Internet scrapbook: automating Web browsing tasks by demonstration

This paper describes a programming-by-demonstration system, called Internet Scrapbook, which allows users with little programming skill to automate repetitive browsing tasks. With the system, the user can create a personal page by clipping only the necessary portions from multiple Web pages. Once the personal page is created, the system updates it on behalf of the user by extracting the specified parts from the latest Web pages. The data extraction method in Scrapbook is based on the regularity in modifications of Web pages, i.e. that headings and positions of articles are rarely changed even though the articles themselves are modified. In the experiments to examine the accuracy of the data extraction algorithm, 96 percent of user-specified portions were correctly extracted.