The free monitoring software is a sophisticated program with lots of options. Each web page that you want to monitor is configured as an alert in the program.

The application supports three different monitoring types.

• Monitor the website (or webpage) availability – Checks if a website is up or down
• Monitor the webpage update – Checks if updates have been posted on the selected website
• Monitor the appearance of specific words – Just like the standard monitoring option, but will only post alerts if content on the web page matches or does not match specific words.

The first two options should be self-explanatory. The third can be used for some interesting things. I for one use something similar to monitor the Ghacks database. I run a script on the site that returns ok or down on the page, depending on the status of the database. I then use a monitoring software to check for the word ok or down on the page. This way I can check if the database is up and running.

It does not have to be something as sophisticated than this, obviously. You could use the option to monitor a web page for new posts from a specific writer or topics, or to get a notification if a price drops on an online shopping website.

The monitoring rate can be set to specific hourly and minutely intervals, e.g. once per hour, or once per day.

All alerts show up in the main program window where they can be paused, edited or deleted easily.

It is possible to open a web page in the program directly, for instance to find specific words that you monitor the page for.

Notifications show up as popups on the desktop. It is optionally possible to add sound notifications for each alert individually. The web page monitor will automatically load the changed web page in its interface to highlight the changes

Notipage is a handy web page monitoring software. You can download the program’s latest version from the developer website. It is compatible with all recent 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

It is pretty obvious that a computerized summary won’t be as good as one from a human. It might still be worth a try if you lack the time or will to read a longish article. A good test text was the CNN article “Five ways to keep Alzheimer’s away”. The expectation for that article was to be presented with a list of the five ways that can keep Alzheimer’s away.

It is up to the user to pick the amount of sentences that should be returned. It can range from 1 to 100. Trying to squeeze a long article in 1 or 2 sentences might fail more often that it would succeed. Selecting 5 or 10 sentences did not reveal the desired information of the Alzheimer article. It did list some of the recommendations but not all of them.

Even more disturbing was the inclusion of part of the footer links which clearly had nothing to do with the article. The problem here is obviously that the service is analyzing the whole page and not only the part that contains the article. Areas like the header, footer or menu should be exempt from the analysis to avoid the confusion.

A Firefox add-on is available for Great Summary as well. It adds an entry to the right-click menu which sends the page to Great Summary.

The service could be very interesting if the developers would improve the detection rate of the important parts of a web page further. They should also lay more emphasize on titles and lists because these usually contain important information.

Still: There is not much to lose here. If you are desperately needing a summary you might want to give Great Summary a try.