Website tracking
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Website tracking refers to the act of archiving existing websites and tracking changes to the website over time. There are many applications to website tracking which can be applied to many different business. We go over each of these applications below:
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[edit] Website Monitoring
Website monitoring allows interested parties to track the health of a website or web application. A software program can periodically check to see if a website is down, if there are broken links or if errors have occurred on particular pages. For example, if I am a web developer who hosts and maintains a website for a customer, I may want to be notified instantly when the site goes or when one of my web applications returns an error.
[edit] Website Change Detection
Website change detection allows interested parties to be alerted when a website has changed. While more and more sites have RSS feeds, many companies either do not have the resources to put RSS feeds on their websites or for competitive reasons may not want to do such a thing. A web crawler can periodically traverse a website to see if any changes have occurred since its last visit. Detecting changes to a website is a non-trivial task with today's dynamically generated websites. Dynamically generated tags and advertisements are especially difficult. A good website change detection tool should take into account all of these issues.
People who need competitive intelligence within a known universe of websites can benefit from knowing when a particular website contains new information or has changed significantly. This application also has benefits for shoppers who may want to know about new items on sale or who may be looking for the launch of a particular product.
[edit] Web Clippings
This is a parallel application to the offline business of press clippings. For web clippings, a crawler needs to scour the Internet to find terms that match keywords the clipping service is looking for. So for instance, the Vice President of the United States may have staff that is looking at press clipping and web clippings to see what is being said about the Vice President on any given day. To do this, a web clippings service needs to monitor mainstream websites as well as blogs. Fortunately, RSS feeds can be employed in this case since these are the areas in which you'll find relevant content.
[edit] Website Archiving
This type of service archives a website so that you can see how the website has changed over time. The problem with seeing different versions of a website is that once you decide you want to see older versions of a website, its too late to begin archiving these changes because that is past history. Fortunately there is at least one web service that tracks changes for most websites for free. You can find a link to this service in the external links below. Past information about a company can therefore be gleened from this type of service which can be very useful in some circumstances.
