Copernic Tracker

Editors' ReviewDownload.com staffOctober 13, 2009It's easy enough to add Web pages for Copernic Tracker to monitor for changes, but narrowing down the results may be more of a challenge. The program integrates with Internet Explorer, adding a context menu option to quickly add the current page to your list of tracked URLs. You can also go directly to the program to add URLs, and the simply designed interface doesn't take long to figure out. By default, you'll get daily alerts when more than five words change for each page you enter. You can change the frequency and word-change limit with ease, but you could be notified each time an ad changes. Even the help file admits that the word-change option could be "hard to manage and sometimes even useless." (You have to admire the brutal honesty.) The developers recommend setting parameters that seek only user-specified words or entering a Boolean query, and PC newbies might struggle in coming up with effective keywords to get the best results. Copernic Tracker effectively traced changes in our test pages, and the yellow highlighting makes the new text or image easy to find. Even so, with so many sites offering RSS feeds, and the easy availability of free RSS readers, this program seems a bit outdated in its do-it-yourself technology.