Page Monitors - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 53

he 30-day free trial lets you track up to 10 URLs. he paid service varies
from $9 a year, to track up to 20 URLs, to $179 a year, to track up to 1,000
URLs. here's also a Premium edition that monitors your pages for updates
multiple times a day; it costs anywhere from $299 to $499 a year, depending
on how many pages you track. Now do you see how ater a certain number
of URLs, using Web-based change detection services gets expensive?
For large companies or enterprises, there's also a server edition available;
you install the sotware on your own server and get more control over the
results and the ability to track huge numbers of pages. Contact InfoMinder
for pricing information.
changeDetect
he free registration that ChangeDetect (changedetect.com) requires as of
this writing also requires you to provide an address and phone number. If
that's not a problem for you, then you'll probably discover that Change-
Detect ofers some very precise features in a presentation that isn't all that
diferent from InfoMinder.
However, the free trial only allows you to monitor ive pages. But Change-
Detect includes a nity option called Bulk Monitors that lets you enter
several pages to monitor at a time.
Once you've set up pages to be monitored, you'll see a page that resembles
InfoMinder's interface, except that it provides more controls ( Figure 3.8 ).
In fact, it looks a little cryptic until you get into it further. he options on
the front page let you go straight to the page being monitored, view the
monitor, modify the monitor, delete the monitor, test the monitor, and see
when the pages were last changed.
he options for modiication are extensive and worth a look. You can provide
thorough descriptions of pages you're monitoring (useful if you're sharing
the monitoring chores), specify how you want change information delivered
to you (you can get an e-mail alert about the page changing or you can get an
e-mail with the changes in it), and choose how oten you want the page to be
checked (every 12 hours, every day, every week, or every month).