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January 10, 2000

Web Organizers:
Organize Your Web Chaos
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The search engine itself, arguably the most important part of Backflip's offering, works as expected. It's principally a keyword index.

Unfortunately, Backflip's service stops there. It doesn't try to archive the pages you're most interested in, so you still have to deal with stale link issues. Without an archiving tool, such as the offline storage used in client-based systems, the wealth of links to which Backflip lends itself may become a little ragged around the edges. Still, Backflip is an excellent starting point for reusing, if not really mining, the Internet.

SurfSaver 2.0 Beta
In many ways, askSam's SurfSaver 2.0 is a more-powerful solution to organizing your Web links, but it makes different demands on your users. Unlike the bookmark-focused Backflip, SurfSaver actually stores a local copy of Web pages that you tag. This eliminates the possibility of stale links and to some degree reduces the demands on your wide area network connections. It also introduces new levels of complexity in interface and consumes disk space. As such, it's a more intensive effort for IT to deploy, particularly in training users.

Saving documents into SurfSaver is reasonably straightforward through an option on your browser's right-click menu. You can choose to save all graphics, or none at all, and add your own keywords and description. You can also automatically download pages linked from this page (controlled by how many levels of links the product should follow). Saving a single page with its graphics intact is simple enough, but traversing links can result in a large download, depending on the presence of navigation bars and other links, not to mention the repeated trips to ad servers and fetching miscellaneous graphics that pepper most Web pages. You'll want to counsel users on the merits of taking more than one page at a time.

Having collected a library of data, however, some users will benefit from the superior searching engine in SurfSaver. With locally saved copies of Web pages, SurfSaver performs full text searches that include Boolean constructions (and, or, not) and proximity (words that appear near each other). You can restrict searches to certain folders and filter by title, URL, or your own descriptions. This versatility makes SurfSaver a particularly powerful tool.

With this version, askSam has dramatically changed licensing arrangements. A full version of the product is available free from SurfSaver's Web site, but the product is supported through ad revenue. When you bring up SurfSaver's search interface, you're also presented with advertisements.

For $29.95, you can download the Pro version, which dispenses with the ads and adds a rudimentary file-sharing system. With the Pro version, users can add shared collections of SurfSaver pages to their libraries. This lets workgroups amass a common collection of files. While this is an encouraging start, it's difficult to describe the support as groupware, and users are best off if there are some policies about how the files should be organized.

The previous version of SurfSaver included an Internet Publishing server--a simple NT Web server that doles out SurfSaver collections. This approach makes much more sense for collaborative collections, although askSam is still updating this server to take advantage of newer features in version 2.0.

Clearly, the SurfSaver approach is more powerful than mere bookmarking, but the interface and best use of the product demand more from users and IT. As such, you ought to carefully consider which users are likely to succeed with this Web organizer.

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