Web page change and persistence—A four‐year longitudinal study

Abstract

Changes in the topography of the Web can be expressed in at least four ways: (1) more sites on more servers in more places, (2) more pages and objects added to existing sites and pages, (3) changes in traffic, and (4) modifications to existing text, graphic, and other Web objects. This article does not address the first three factors (more sites, more pages, more traffic) in the growth of the Web. It focuses instead on changes to an existing set of Web documents. The article documents changes to an aging set of Web pages, first identified and "collected" in December 1996 and followed weekly thereafter. Results are reported through February 2001. The article addresses two related phenomena: (1) the life cycle of Web objects, and (2) changes to Web objects. These data reaffirm that the half-life of a Web page is approximately 2years. There is variation among Web pages by top-level domain and by page type (navigation, content). Web page content appears to stabilize over time; aging pages change less often than once they did.

The impact of impermanent Web‐located citations: A study of 123 scholarly conference publications

“…Subsequent studies by Koehler (2002) However, the authors noted that many Web references were invalid which was an impediment to allowing them to investigate and verify the content of these sources.…”

Web Crawler: A Review

“…The study furthermore found that past change was a good judge of future change, this page length was correlated with change, and that the top level domain of a page was correlated with change. Describing the amount of change on the Web has been of significant interest to researchers [44], [46], [47], [48], [49], [50], [52]. Cho and Garcia-Molina [44] crawled around 720,000 pages once a day for a period of four months and seemed at how the pages changed.…”

Padrões para bibliotecas digitais abertas e interoperáveis

“…Estima-se que esse erro ocorre em cerca de 7% dos links (Bigwood, 1999). Numa medida ao longo do tempo, tendo como objeto de estudo uma amostra aleatoriamente selecionada de URL´s, foi demonstrado que somente cerca de 34% dos URL´s permaneciam ativos depois de um período de quatro anos (Koehler, 2002 …”