Roadmap

An overview of our software's development, from the latest features to our future plans.

Released Versions

Version 1.3 Current
Key New Features:
  • Revamp of the registration process: Implementation of resend verification email and recaptcha validation.
  • Revision of the Assessment Interface:
    • - Implementation of a survey functionality to show more than one question to an URL
    • - Include and exclude filters for URLs
    • - New option to show URLs of search results in the Assessment Interface and to limit the number of results a study participant shall assess
    • - Duplication filter for URLs to ensure participants do not see the same URL twice.
Released on: August 1, 2025
Version 1.2
New Features:
  • Added a new classifier to measure the seo effort of an URL based on the work in the project SEO-Effekt 2 https://github.com/sebsuenkler/seo-effekt-2
  • Completely revamp of the search result scaper backend processes.
List of new or updated search engine scrapers in several languages (DE, FR, IT, NL, PL, SE, US):
  • DuckDuckGo Video
Released on: May 5, 2025
Version 1.1
New Features:
  • Added new filters for the selection of search engines.
  • Added new functionality to select result ranges for scraping.
  • Added a new classifier to measure the readability of a document, based on the work of @mohamedsaeed21
  • Added new language version for scraping results from the UK (Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo)
Released on: November 11, 2024
Version 1.0
Features:
  • A Flask web application serving as the frontend for creating and managing search engine research studies.
  • A backend scraping framework for automatically collecting search results from search engines, with optional content classification features.
  • Centralized storage of all results in a PostgreSQL database.
  • Background processing to distribute the workload across tasks efficiently.
  • SEO Classifier based on https://github.com/sebsuenkler/seoeffekt to measure the SEO probality of URLs
List of search engine scrapers in several languages (DE, FR, IT, NL, PL, SE, US):
  • Google
  • Microsoft Bing
  • Ecosia
  • Google Video
  • Katalogplus
Released on: August 12, 2024

Planned Developments

Version 1.4 Coming Soon
Planned Features:
  • Scraper for AI Overviews in Google
  • Task-based evaluations in TREC style
  • A new scraping scheduler will allow you to set up recurring data collection, making it easy to conduct long-term monitoring studies without manual intervention.
  • Analyzing module to calculate standard Information Retrieval metrics and create visualizations
Future Ideas

We are continuously working on improving our software. The following topics are next on our agenda:

  • - Developing APIs and interfaces to connect RAT with other research applications
  • - Offering a local installation of RAT with an easy to follow installation routine
  • - Sophisticated automated testing for all scrapers and classifiers
  • - Monitoring interface for getting real time feedback of RAT instances
  • - Implementation of more classifiers to conduct more automatic analyses