The new program, called Peridot, crawls through company weblinks and replaces broken links with current, relevant documents, according to James Bell, a University of Warwick computer science student who worked on the project.
“Peridot could lead to a world where there are no more broken likes,” Bell told BBC News Online.
Named after a gemstone thought to help locate find lost objects, the utility works by taking snapshots of each company webpage, following each link on the page and then comparing each new page to those previously indexed, said Andrew Flegg, an IBM software engineer and Peridot team mentor.
“The way we identify the content is through a process called fingerprinting which allows us to take representation of a document like a fingerprint,” said Flegg.
While similar programs already exist, they only detect when links are broken. Peridot can act autonomously to change the links or send emails to administrators that report the changed links and ask for instructions on how to handle them.
Peridot was one of several internship projects unveiled at the Extreme Blue program meeting in Amsterdam this week.
Also unveiled at the meeting was an application that listens to call center phone calls, identifies keywords and provides call center operators with possible answers to the question, as well as new technology that monitors supermarket customer shopping habits and displays relevant advertisements on shopping carts.
