Product Reviews

Webaroo is an internet archiving and information search application. Its free client lets you download compressed web packs based around different subjects and search them. You can also save your favourite websites and associated pages for offline reference. This gives the illusion of being online without actually being connected to the internet; at least, that's the theory.

At the time of writing the web packs are limited to information about 22 world cities, of up to 256MB each; a World Cup pack, also 256MB; a 64MB World News pack; and a compressed version of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which is a whopping 6GB. This can hardly be called comprehensive internet coverage, but that's not the intention, despite the marketing blurb.

The idea is to provide coverage of predefined subjects. So the Sydney guide, like all the city packs, contains hundreds of searchable web pages covering all aspects of the city, from hotel and nightlife guides to recent news stories, maps and tourist attractions. The city guides are aimed squarely at tourists, presumably because anyone living in the city in question will probably have a reliable internet connection. It should be like taking a free holiday guide with you, but it's not.

In trying to get as much varied content into each pack as possible, Webaroo has cast its information net wide, but at the expense of depth. For example, you will find countless references to the same hotels in each pack, but because most of the content is only one page deep, you often can't take the next step and navigate

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through to customer reviews. The beauty of the internet is reduced dramatically, so that where once there were no dead ends, now every turn leads to one.

Saving your favourite websites for later consumption reveals the same problem. It is rare that you'll stay within the first two levels - root and one level down - of a site when browsing, but this is Webaroo's mining limit. It means that the amount of time to download and the amount of storage space required is kept to a minimum, but what's the point if you can't use it as you normally would? Webaroo was apparently founded on the premise that notebooks and other portable devices would have hundreds of gigabytes of storage in the near future and plenty of space to store masses of information. If so, why the conservative limit?

The News web packet is an exercise in frustration. While it is true that a large number of sources are consulted and therefore different views of the same event are presented, you cannot follow the story. In fact, by the time you have found it in a Webaroo archive, events will have moved on and further action have taken place. This is not a problem in traditional newspapers, where content is necessarily static, because there is time for comment and mature analysis. That is not the case for internet sources, which rely on a constant stream of information to engage the reader. Cut off the stream and you cut off the reader. You would be better served buying a newspaper.

Webaroo runs in the Windows taskbar and uses a web interface in your default browser. The controls are simple and it takes no time to master downloading information and configuring website capture. Both the pre-compiled web packs and your designated websites can be updated automatically when you connect to the internet. The web packs are predictably large and will eat up your connection bandwidth, so you might want to set both web pack and website update to manual.

It doesn't seem to matter how good the implementation is in this case, because the underlying principle of Webaroo seems flawed to us. Better paper-based alternatives are available, never mind computer-based ones.