I performed a quick research on freeware web monitoring applications. By web monitoring application I mean a desktop application offering at least the following functionality:
- The user enters a list of web pages to be monitored.
- For each web page, the user assigns custom rules that tell what kind of updates she is interested in (eg. all updates, or updates that contain a specific keyword only).
- The program runs in the background and alerts the user whenever the suitable update occurs.
Most of the applications I’ve tested were totally unusable, but there are three interesting ones:
If I had to recommend one of them as the best one, I would probably choose Page Update Watcher. Apart from standard features common to all these programs (define checking intervals, various alert methods etc.) it allows for grouping of monitored web pages – functionality essential if you have to track dozens of sites. Another useful feature of this application is the possibility of defining a web page area to be monitored, so that all updates outside of the area are ignored. OutPosted takes a different approach here: it allows you to specify how many changes on a page are required in order to classify the page as updated.
What all these programs miss is the ability of defining custom keywords for each monitored web page. Such feature is necessary if you need to keep track of certain trademarks, or if you are interested in news from a certain domain. So to sum up, if you need to perform non-trivial web monitoring, I’d rather look at commercial solutions.