Either by ensuring the continuing availability of information, or by deliberately caching content that might get deleted or removed, Web archiving services play an increasingly important role in today's information ecosystem. Among these, the Wayback Machine has been proactively archiving, since 2001, versions of a large number of Web pages, while newer services like archive.is allow users to create on-demand snapshots of specific Web pages, which serve as time capsules that can be shared across the Web. In this paper, we present a large-scale analysis of Web archiving services and their use on social media, aiming to shed light on the actors involved in this ecosystem, the content that gets archived, and how it is shared. To this end, we crawl and study: 1) 21M URLs, spanning almost two years, from archive.is; and 2) 356K archive.is plus 391K Wayback Machine URLs that were shared on four social networks: Reddit, Twitter, Gab, and 4chan's Politically Incorrect board ( pol ) over 14 months. We observe that news and social media posts are the most common types of content archived, likely due to their perceived ephemeral and or controversial nature. Moreover, URLs of archiving services are extensively shared on "fringe" communities within Reddit and 4chan to preserve possibly contentious content. Lastly, we find evidence of moderators nudging or even forcing users to use archives, instead of direct links, for news sources with opposing ideologies, potentially depriving them of ad revenue.
Archived content. @cite_24 study the evolution of JavaScript using historical data of 3M Web pages from the Wayback Machine, while @cite_29 analyze how Web trackers have evolved in the previous decade. @cite_14 predict whether an uncompromised website will become malicious also using the Wayback Machine. @cite_27 study how the German Web has evolved in the past 18 years using data from the Wayback Machine for 100 popular domains, highlighting the exponential growth of the number of pages. Then, @cite_31 characterize the accessibility of websites using a random sample of sites from the Wayback Machine between 1997 and 2002.
@cite_14 @cite_29 @cite_24 @cite_27 @cite_31
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Using Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, a random sample of websites from 1997-2002 were retrospectively analyzed for effects that technology has on accessibility for persons with disabilities and compared to government websites. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and Tukey's HSD were used to determine differences among years. Random websites become progressively inaccessible through the years (p The Web is characterized by an extremely dynamic nature, as it is proved by the rapid and significant growth it has experimented in the last decade and by its continuous evolution through creation or deletion of pages and hyperlinks. Consequently, analyzing the temporal evolution of the Web has become a crucial task that can provide search engines with valuable information for refining crawling policies, improving ranking models or detecting spam. Understanding how the Web evolves over time is a delicate challenge that requires to integrate theoretical efforts of modelization and empirical results. Obtaining such findings is very expensive in terms of bandwidth, computation time and human intervention. Robust software is required to gather the data and provide easy access to the collected information. Apart for commercial engines, there have been only a few attempts to perform such task and to make the data available. Several previous works (e.g., ntoulas2004what,toyoda2006what ) analyzed a sequence of crawls, studying degree and frequency of change both in the content of Web pages and in the hyperlink structure to propose measures of their novelty. In this paper we study a temporal dataset BSVLTAG that has recently been made public. It is made of twelve 100M pages snapshots of the .uk domain. The Web graphs of the single snapshots have been merged into a global graph with labels that provide constant time access to temporal information. bordino2008temporal describes the work done to assess the data and to study some aspects of its evolution at the level of Web pages. We now analyze the structure of this huge time-aware graph at the level of interconnection between hosts. We study the , i.e., the graph in which every node corresponds to a site, whereas a directed edge represents the existence of hyperlinks between pages belonging to two different hosts. Understanding the graph structure of the Web at this macroscopic level can provide valuable insights for improving Web site accessibility and navigation, or discovering related hosts. The notion of hostgraph was proposed by bharat2001who . A few studies analyzed hostgraphs ( baeza2005spain,liu2005china,toyoda2008thai ). baeza2007domain presents a comparison among the results of twelve characterization studies of several national domains. 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. This Note addresses the use of archived Internet content obtained via the Wayback Machine, a service provided by the Internet Archive that accesses the largest online digital collection of archived Web pages in the world. Given the dynamic nature of the World Wide Web, Internet content is constantly changed, amended, and removed. As a result, interim versions of Web pages have limited life spans. The Internet Archive indexes and stores Web pages to allow researchers to access discarded or since-altered versions. In the legal profession, archived Web pages have become an increasingly helpful form of proof. Intellectual property enforcers have recognized the value of the Internet Archive as a tool for tracking down infringers, but evidence from the Internet Archive has rarely been admitted at trial. This Note surveys the handful of judicial opinions and orders that comment on the admission of Internet Archive evidence and explores the conflict underlying these approaches. As an alternative to the courses they have taken, this Note urges courts to treat the introduction of archived Web pages as implicating a best evidence issue in addition to an authentication question. Under this approach, courts would decide using evidence sufficient to the purpose, but not necessarily admissible at trial, whether the archived page qualifies as a 'duplicate' of a page that once appeared on the Web. Beyond that, courts would apply authentication standards already developed to decide whether a reasonable jury could find, based only on admissible evidence, whether proffered evidence accurately represents the page stored on the Internet Archive server and, if necessary, whether the original page accurately represented material placed on the originating site by the site’s owner or operator. With this additional step, reliable evidence from the Wayback Machine can become as easily admitted as any other Internet-derived proof.