Abstract
The Internet Archive’s (IA) Wayback Machine is the largest and oldest public Web archive and has become a significant repository of our recent history and cultural heritage. Despite its importance, there has been little research about how it is discovered and used. Based on Web access logs, we analyze what users are looking for, why they come to IA, where they come from, and how pages link to IA. We find that users request English pages the most, followed by the European languages. Most human users come to Web archives because they do not find the requested pages on the live Web. About 65 % of the requested archived pages no longer exist on the live Web. We find that more than 82 % of human sessions connect to the Wayback Machine via referrals from other Web sites, while only 15 % of robots have referrers. Most of the links (86 %) from Websites are to individual archived pages at specific points in time, and of those 83 % no longer exist on the live Web. Finally, we find that users who come from search engines browse more pages than users who come from external Web sites.
Notes
Apache “Combined Log File Format”.
References
Bounce rate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounce_rate
Category: All articles with dead external links. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:All_articles_with_dead_external_links
Wikipedia: Link rot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Link_rot
Wikipedia: Using the Wayback Machine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Using_the_Wayback_Machine
Internet Archive appeals for donations after \(600,000\) in fire damage. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/08/internet-archive-appeals-donations-fire-damage (2013)
Internet Archive building damaged by fire. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24848907 (2013)
Wikimedia Report Card. http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/ (2014)
Ainsworth, S.G., Alsum, A., SalahEldeen, H., Weigle, M.C., Nelson, M.L.: How much of the web is archived? In: Proceedings of the 11th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, JCDL ’11, p. 133. ACM Press, USA (2011)
AlNoamany, Y., Weigle, M.C., Nelson, M.L.: Access patterns for robots and humans in web archives. In: Proceedings of the 13th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, JCDL ’13, pp. 339–348. ACM, USA. doi:10.1145/2467696.2467722. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2467696.2467722 (2013) ISBN 978-1-4503-2077-1
Alsum, A., Weigle, M., Nelson, M., Sompel, H.: Profiling web archive coverage for top-level domain and content language. Research and advanced technology for digital libraries. Lecture notes in computer science, pp. 60–71. Springer, Berlin (2013)
Anick, P.: Using terminological feedback for web search refinement—a log-based study. In: Proceedings of the 26th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Informaion Retrieval, SIGIR ’03, pp. 88–95. ACM, USA (2003)
Aye, T.T.: Web log cleaning for mining of web usage patterns. In: IEEE 3rd International Conference on Computer Research and Development, ICCRD, pp. 490–494 (2011)
Banos, V., Kim, Y., Ross, S., Manolopoulos, Y.: CLEAR: a credible method to evaluate website archivability. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects, iPRES (2013)
Bar-Yossef, Z., Broder, A.Z., Kumar, R., Tomkins, A.: Sic Transit Gloria Telae: towards an understanding of the web’s decay. In: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW ’04, pp. 328–337. ACM, USA (2004)
Broache, A.: FBI rescinds secret order for Internet Archive records. http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9938603-7.html (2008)
Brown, R.: Selecting and weighting N-grams to identify 1100 languages. Text, speech, and dialogue. Lecture notes in computer science, pp. 475–483. Springer, Berlin (2013)
Carmel, D., Yom-Tov, E., Roitman, H.: Enhancing digital libraries using missing content analysis. In: Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, JCDL ’08, pp. 1–10. ACM, USA (2008)
Castellano, G., Fanelli, A.M., Torsello, M.A.: LODAP: A LOg DAta Preprocessor for mining Web browsing patterns. In: Proceedings of the 6th WSEAS International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Engineering and Data Bases, AIKED ’07, vol. 6, pp. 12–17 (2007)
Catledge, L.D., Pitkow, J.E.: Characterizing browsing strategies in the world-wide web. Comput. Netw. ISDN Syst. 27(6), 1065–1073 (1995)
Cooley, R., Mobasher, B.: Data preparation for mining World Wide Web browsing patterns. Knowl. Inf. Syst. 1, 5–32 (1999)
Costa, M., J. Silva, M.: Characterizing search behavior in Web Archives. In: Proceedings of Temporal Web Analytics Workshop, TWAW (2011)
Costa, M., Silva, M.J.: Understanding the information needs of web archive users. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Web Archiving, Workshop, pp. 9–16 (2010)
Dikaiakos, M.D., Stassopoulou, A., Papageorgiou, L.: An investigation of web crawler behavior: characterization and metrics. Comput. Commun. 28(8), 880–897 (2005)
Doran, D., Gokhale, S.S.: Web robot detection techniques: overview and limitations. Data Min. Knowl. Discov. 22(1–2), 183–210 (2010)
Fukuda, K., Cho, K., Esaki, H.: The impact of residential broadband traffic on Japanese ISP backbones. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 35(1), 15–22 (2005)
Harrison, T.L., Nelson, M.L.: Just-in-time recovery of missing Web Pages. In: Proceedings of the 17th Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, HYPERTEXT ’06, pp. 145–156. ACM, USA (2006)
Horrigan, J.: Broadband adoption and use in America. Federal Commun. Comm. (2010)
Kahle, B.: Preserving the Internet. Sci. Am. 276(3), 82–83 (1997)
Kahle, B.: Fire update: lost many cameras, 20 boxes. No one hurt. https://blog.archive.org/2013/11/06/scanning-center-fire-please-help-rebuild/ (2013)
Kahle, B.: Reader privacy at the Internet Archive. http://blog.archive.org/2013/10/25/reader-privacy-at-the-internet-archive/ (2013)
Kahle, B.: Wayback Machine: now with 240,000,000,000 URLs. http://blog.archive.org/2013/01/09/updated-wayback/ (2013)
Kemper, E.A., Stringfield, S., Teddlie, C.: Mixed methods sampling strategies in social science research. Handbook of mixed methods in social and behavioral research, pp. 273–296 (2003)
Koehler, W.: Web page change and persistence-a four-year longitudinal study. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 53(2), 162–171 (2002)
Kramer-Smyth, J., Nishigaki, M., Anglade, T.: ArchivesZ: Visualizing archival collections. http://archivesz.com/ArchivesZ.pdf (2007)
Krzywinski, M., Schein, J., Birol, İ., Connors, J., Gascoyne, R., Horsman, D., Jones, S.J., Marra, M.A.: Circos: an information aesthetic for comparative genomics. Genome Res. 19(9), 1639–1645 (2009)
Kumar, R., Tomkins, A.: A characterization of online browsing behavior. In: Proceedings of the 19th International World Wide Web Conference, WWW ’10, pp. 561–570. ACM, USA (2010)
Liu, H., Kešelj, V.: Combined mining of web server logs and web contents for classifying user navigation patterns and predicting users’ future requests. Data Knowl. Eng. 61(2), 304–330 (2007)
Markov, Z., Larose, D.T.: Data mining the web: uncovering patterns in wWeb content, structure, and usage. Wiley, New York (2007)
Negulescu, K.C.: Web archiving @ the Internet Archive. In: Presentation at the 2010 Digital Preservation Partners Meeting, http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/meetings/documents/ndiipp10/NDIIPP072110FinalIA.ppt (2010)
Nelson, M.L., Allen, B.D.: Object persistence and availability in digital libraries. D-Lib Mag. 8(1) (2002).10.1045/january2002-nelson
Nithya, P., Sumathi, P.: Novel pre-processing technique for web log mining by removing global noise, cookies and web robots. Int. J. Comput. Appl. 53(17), 1–6 (2012)
Omodei, M.: Trends in use of Pandora Archive. International Internet Preservation Consortium. http://netpreserve.org/sites/default/files/resources/IIPC-GA-NLA-presentation_m.pdf (2012)
Padia, K., AlNoamany, Y., Weigle, M.C.: Visualizing digital collections at Archive-It. In: Proceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, JCDL ’12, pp. 15–18. ACM, USA (2012)
Reddy, K.S., Varma, G.P.S., Babu, I.R.: Preprocessing the Web Server Logs: an illustrative approach for effective usage mining. ACM SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes 37(3), 1–5 (2012)
Reisinger, D.: Netflix gobbles a third of peak Internet traffic in North America. CNET, http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57546405-93/netflix-gobbles-a-third-of-peak-internet-traffic-in-north-america/ (2012)
Rossi, A.: Fixing broken links on the Internet | Internet Archive Blogs. https://blog.archive.org/2013/10/25/fixing-broken-links/ (2013)
SalahEldeen, H.M., Nelson, M.L.: Carbon dating the web: estimating the age of web resources. In: Proceedings of 3rd Temporal Web Analytics Workshop, TempWeb ’13, pp. 1075–1082 (2013)
Sanderson, R., Phillips, M., Van de Sompel, H.: Analyzing the Persistence of referenced web resources with Memento. Tech. Rep. arXiv:1105.3459 (2011)
Shuyo, N.: Language Detection Library - 99% over precision for 49 languages. http://www.slideshare.net/shuyo/language-detection-library-for-java (2010)
Shuyo, N.: Language Detection Library for Java. http://code.google.com/p/language-detection/ (2012)
Silva, A.J.C., Gonçalves, M.A., Laender, A.H.F., Modesto, M.A.B., Cristo, M., Ziviani, N.: Finding what is missing from a digital library: a case study in the computer science field. Inf. Process. Manage. 45(3), 380–391 (2009)
Smith, A.: Home broadband 2010. Technical report, Pew Internet & American Life Project, An initiative of the Pew Research Center (2010)
Spiliopoulou, M., Mobasher, B., Berendt, B., Nakagawa, M.: A framework for the evaluation of session reconstruction heuristics in web-usage analysis. INFORMS J. Comput. 15(2), 171–190 (2003)
Srivastava, J., Cooley, R., Deshpande, M., Tan, P.N.: Web usage mining: discovery and applications of usage patterns from Web data. ACM SIGKDD Explor. Newslett. 1(2), 12 (2000). doi:10.1145/846183.846188
Stassopoulou, A., Dikaiakos, M.D.: Web robot detection: a probabilistic reasoning approach. Comput. Netw. 53(3), 265–278 (2009)
Streitfeld, A.: Internet Archive will shield visitors - NYTimes.com. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/internet-archive-will-shield-visitors/ (2013)
Tan, P.N., Kumar, V.: Discovery of web robot sessions based on their navigational patterns. Data Min. Knowl. Discov. 6(1), 9–35 (2002)
Tanasa, D., Trousse, B.: Advanced data preprocessing for intersites Web usage mining. IEEE Intell. Syst. 19(2), 59–65 (2004)
Teddlie, C., Yu, F.: Mixed methods sampling: a typology with examples. J. Mixed Methods Res. 1(1), 77–100 (2007)
Thelwall, M., Vaughan, L.: A fair history of the Web? Examining country balance in the Internet Archive. Libr. Inf. Sci. Res. 26(2), 162–176 (2004)
Tofel, B.: Wayback for accessing Web Archives. In: Proceedings of International Web Archiving Workshop, IWAW (2007)
Tongco, M., Dolores, C.: Purposive sampling as a tool for informant selection. Ethnobot. Res. Appl. 5, 147–158 (2008)
Van de Sompel, H., Nelson, M.L., Sanderson, R.: RFC 7089—HTTP framework for time-based access to resource states—Memento. http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7089 (2013)
Van de Sompel, H., Nelson, M.L., Sanderson, R., Balakireva, L.L., Ainsworth, S., Shankar, H.: Memento: Time Travel for the Web. Tech. Rep. arXiv:0911.1112 (2009)
Van Ryzin, G.G.: Cluster analysis as a basis for purposive sampling of projects in case study evaluations. Am. J. Eval. 16(2), 109–119 (1995)
Wasserman, T.: Netflix takes up 32.7% of Internet bandwidth. Mashable, http://mashable.com/2011/10/27/netflix-takes-up-32-7-of-internet-bandwidth-study/ (2011)
Whitelaw, M.: Exploring archival collections with interactive visualisation. In: Proceedings of E-Research Australasia Conference (2009)
Zhuang, Z., Wagle, R., Giles, C.: What’s there and what’s not? Focused crawling for missing documents in digital libraries. In: Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, JCDL ’05, pp. 301–310 (2005)
Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by the NSF (IIS 1009392) and the Library of Congress. We thank Kris Carpenter Negulescu (Internet Archive) for access to the anonymized Wayback Machine logs.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
AlNoamany, Y., AlSum, A., Weigle, M.C. et al. Who and what links to the Internet Archive. Int J Digit Libr 14, 101–115 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-014-0111-5
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-014-0111-5