Curated web archive collections contain focused digital contents which are collected by archiving organizations to provide a representative sample covering specific topics and events to preserve them for future exploration and analysis. In this paper, we discuss how to best support collaborative construction and exploration of these collections through the ArchiveWeb system. ArchiveWeb has been developed using an iterative evaluation-driven design-based research approach, with considerable user feedback at all stages. This paper describes the functionalities of our current prototype for searching, constructing, exploring and discussing web archive collections, as well as feedback on this prototype from seven archiving organizations, and our plans for improving the next release of the system.
Tools for supporting search and exploration in web archives are still limited @cite_0 . Most desired search functionalities in web archives are fulltext search with good ranking, followed by URL search @cite_13 . A recent survey showed that 89 provide URL search access and 79 @cite_4 . Some existing projects that provide limited support for web archive research are discussed below.
@cite_0 @cite_13 @cite_4
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Web archives are a huge source of information to mine the past. However, tools to explore web archives are still in their infancy, in part due to the reduced knowledge that we have of their users. We contribute to this knowledge by presenting the first search behavior characterization of web archive users. We obtained detailed statistics about the users’ sessions, queries, terms and clicks from the analysis of their search logs. The results show that users did not spend much time and effort searching the past. They prefer short sessions, composed of short queries and few clicks. Full-text search is preferred to URL search, but both are frequently used. There is a strong evidence that users prefer the oldest documents over the newest, but mostly search without any temporal restriction. We discuss all these findings and their implications on the design of future web archives. This article proposes a process to retrieve the URL of a document for which metadata records exist in a digital library catalog but a pointer to the full text of the document is not available. The process uses results from queries submitted to Web search engines for finding the URL of the corresponding full text or any related material. We present a comprehensive study of this process in different situations by investigating different query strategies applied to three general purpose search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN) and two specialized ones (Scholar and CiteSeer), considering five user scenarios. Specifically, we have conducted experiments with metadata records taken from the Brazilian Digital Library of Computing (BDBComp) and The DBLP Computer Science Bibliography (DBLP). We found that Scholar was the most effective search engine for this task in all considered scenarios and that simple strategies for combining and re-ranking results from Scholar and Google significantly improve the retrieval quality. Moreover, we study the influence of the number of query results on the effectiveness of finding missing information as well as the coverage of the proposed scenarios. The World Wide Web is becoming a source of information for researchers, who are more aware of the possibilities for collections of Internet content as resources. Some have begun creating archives of web content for social science and humanities research. However, there is a growing gulf between policies shared between global and national institutions creating web archives and the practices of researchers making use of the archives. Each set of stakeholders finds the others’ web archiving contributions less applicable to their own field. Institutions find the contributions of researchers to be too narrow to meet the needs of the institution’s audience, and researchers find the contributions of institutions to be too broad to meet the needs of their research methods. Resources are extended to advance both institutional and researcher tools, but the gulf between the two is persistent. Institutions generally produce web archives that are broad in scope but with limited access and enrichment tools. The design of common access interfaces, such as the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, limit access points to archives to only URL and date. This narrow access limits the ways in which web archives can be valuable for exploring research questions in the humanities and social sciences. Individual scholars, in catering to their own disciplinary and methodological needs, produce web archives that are narrow in scope, and whose access and enrichment tools are personalized to work within the boundaries of the project for which the web archive was built. There is no way to explore a subset of an archive by topic, event, or idea. The current search paradigm in web archiving access tools is built primarily on retrieval, not discovery. We suggest that there is a need for extensible tools to enhance access to and enrichment of web archives to make them more readily reusable and so, more valuable for both institutions and researchers, and that annotation activities can serve as one potential guide for development of such tools to bridge the divide. Current web search engines focus on searching only themost recentsnapshot of the web. In some cases, however, it would be desirableto search over collections that include many different crawls andversions of each page. One important example of such a collectionis the Internet Archive, though there are many others. Sincethe data size of such an archive is multiple times that of a singlesnapshot, this presents us with significant performance challenges.Current engines use various techniques for index compression andoptimized query execution, but these techniques do not exploit thesignificant similarities between different versions of a page, or betweendifferent pages.In this paper, we propose a general framework for indexing andquery processing of archival collections and, more generally, anycollections with a sufficient amount of redundancy. Our approachresults in significant reductions in index size and query processingcosts on such collections, and it is orthogonal to and can be combinedwith the existing techniques. It also supports highly efficientupdates, both locally and over a network. Within this framework,we describe and evaluate different implementations that trade offindex size versus CPU cost and other factors, and discuss applicationsranging from archival web search to local search of web sites,email archives, or file systems. We present experimental resultsbased on search engine query log and a large collection consistingof multiple crawls.