New search engine to make obsolete formats accessible.

• Position: TECHNOLOGY - Brief article

There could be good news on the horizon for accessing obsolete electronic file formats. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is developing a new search engine named Brown Dog, which will convert defunct computer files into accessible formats, PBS News-Hour recently reported.

Kenton McHenry, a senior research scientist at the NCSA, explained that a user will be able to feed a file saved in an obsolete format into the cloud-based search engine, and it will transform the file into a format the browser can read. It will also...