WebMate
Introduction | System Requirements
Setup and Run | Applet
in Browsing Mode
Introduction
WebMate is a personal browsing and searching agent. It accompanies you when you use the Internet, and provides you with information it gathers based on your user profile, which you create as you browse the Internet and use WebMate.
Features
- Searching enhancement, (which includes parallel search, searching keywords refinement and relevant feedback), allows WebMate to send search requests to search engines, get results from these requests, and reorder them according to the degree of overlapping which occurs among the different search engines. These functions employ our relevant keywords extraction technology.
- Browsing assistant performs the following tasks. It will learn your current interests, recommend new URLs to you according to your profile and selected resources, allow you to rename URLs with aliases, monitor bookmarks in Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer, find other pages like the current page you are browsing, send the current browsing page to your friends, and prefetch the hyperlinks of the page you are browsing.
- Offline browsing allows you to download pages for offline browsing, get the references of pages, and be able to print the page complete with the URL references intact.
- Filtering HTTP header will record the http header and all the transactions between your browser and the WWW servers, filter the incoming cookies to protect your privacy, and block animation (gif.) files to speed up your browsing.
- Check: WebMate will check your HTML page to find errors in it, and will also test any embedded links to see if their pages are still active. This function is helpful if you are learning to write HTML pages or are simply interested in maintaining your own site.
WebMate can dynamically set up many different resources, including search engines, on-line dictionaries, and on-line translation systems. Also, WebMate is programmed in Java, which makes it portable to all operating systems, and able to multi-thread.
WebMate Interfaces
WebMate consists of a standalone proxy and an applet controller.
- Standalone proxy
- Applet controller
- In the browsing mode:
- In the searching mode:
Please note: WebMate is a prototype, and as such, needs to be used with its experimental status in mind. Users who have tested WebMate say there are two main areas where future programs could improve on this initial WebMate design.
- The first is speed--as you use WebMate, you may find it slow to respond at times. However, it is not uniformly slow, and generally runs as fast as your system can permit. (When WebMate is starting up, it takes some time for it to load all its news groups and other "resources." If you wish, you can prevent it from doing this by going into the "Edit" menu, selecting "Resources," and deleting the newsgroups it is preprogrammed to use. You can then enter in your own, or select and choose which groups you would like WebMate to use--either option will allow WebMate to begin running sooner than it otherwise would.)
- The other issue with WebMate that users have noticed is that it does not run equally well with all computer systems. While it can be loaded and run on any system, users here at CMU have had the best luck using WebMate on UNIX systems with direct access to an HTTP server.
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