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The AT&T Internet Difference Engine: Tracking and viewing changes on the web

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Abstract

The AT&T Internet Difference Engine (AIDE) is a system that finds and displays changes to pages on the World Wide Web. The system consists of several components, including a web‐crawler that detects changes, an archive of past versions of pages, a tool called HtmlDiff to highlight changes between versions of a page, and a graphical interface to view the relationship between pages over time. This paper describes AIDE, with an emphasis on the evolution of the system and experiences with it. It also raises some sociological and legal issues.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. AT&T Labs – Research, 180 Park Ave, Florham Park, NJ, 07932‐0971, USA E-mail

    Fred Douglis, Yih‐Farn Chen & Eleftherios Koutsofios

  2. Lucent Technologies, Bell Laboratories, 1000 E. Warrenville Rd., Naperville, IL, 60566‐7013, USA E-mail

    Thomas Ball

Authors
  1. Fred Douglis
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  2. Thomas Ball
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  3. Yih‐Farn Chen
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  4. Eleftherios Koutsofios
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Douglis, F., Ball, T., Chen, Y. et al. The AT&T Internet Difference Engine: Tracking and viewing changes on the web. World Wide Web 1, 27–44 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1019243126596

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