The web is trapped in the "perpetual now", and when users traverse from page to page, they are seeing the state of the web resource (i.e., the page) as it exists at the time of the click and not necessarily at the time when the link was made. Thus, a temporal discrepancy can arise between the resource at the time the page author created a link to it and the time when a reader follows the link. This is especially important in the context of social media: the ease of sharing links in a tweet or Facebook post allows many people to author web content, but the space constraints combined with poor awareness by authors often prevents sufficient context from being generated to determine the intent of the post. If the links are clicked as soon as they are shared, the temporal distance between sharing and clicking is so small that there is little to no difference in content. However, not all clicks occur immediately, and a delay of days or even hours can result in reading something other than what the author intended. We introduce the concept of a user's temporal intention upon publishing a link in social media. We investigate the features that could be extracted from the post, the linked resource, and the patterns of social dissemination to model this user intention. Finally, we analyze the historical integrity of the shared resources in social media across time. In other words, how much is the knowledge of the author's intent beneficial in maintaining the consistency of the story being told through social posts and in enriching the archived content coverage and depth of vulnerable resources?
The problem of disappearing or changing resources has been well-studied. The changing aboutness of live web pages has been studied in the Walden's Path project @cite_16 and the link vetting system @cite_36 . For link rot, Kahle originally reported the expected lifetime of a web page is 44 days @cite_22 . Loss of references and URIs appearing in the academic literature have been studied numerous times, with exact loss rates varying depending on the corpus @cite_25 . In our Just-in-time'' preservation research we discovered new locations of web pages that are missing in the current web @cite_28 . We investigated a variety of techniques, including using page titles @cite_20 , tags DBLP:conf ercimdl KleinN11 , and lexical signatures @cite_13 , all of which could be used as queries to search engines to find replacement copies of the missing web page.
@cite_22 @cite_36 @cite_28 @cite_16 @cite_13 @cite_25 @cite_20
1905830520 2803559548 2950114289 2157004265
Given the dynamic nature of the World Wide Web, missing web pages, or "404 Page not Found" responses, are part of our web browsing experience. It is our intuition that information on the web is rarely completely lost, it is just missing. In whole or in part, content often moves from one URI to another and hence it just needs to be (re-)discovered. We evaluate several methods for a "just-in-time" approach to web page preservation. We investigate the suitability of lexical signatures and web page titles to rediscover missing content. It is understood that web pages change over time which implies that the performance of these two methods depends on the age of the content. We therefore conduct a temporal study of the decay of lexical signatures and titles and estimate their half-life. We further propose the use of tags that users have created to annotate pages as well as the most salient terms derived from a page's link neighborhood. We utilize the Memento framework to discover previous versions of web pages and to execute the above methods. We provide a workflow including a set of parameters that is most promising for the (re-)discovery of missing web pages. We introduce Synchronicity, a web browser add-on that implements this workflow. It works while the user is browsing and detects the occurrence of 404 errors automatically. When activated by the user Synchronicity offers a total of six methods to either rediscover the missing page at its new URI or discover an alternative page that satisfies the user's information need. Synchronicity depends on user interaction which enables it to provide results in real time. Event-based collections are often started with a web search, but the search results you find on Day 1 may not be the same as those you find on Day 7. In this paper, we consider collections that originate from extracting URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) from Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Specifically, we seek to provide insight about the retrievability of URIs of news stories found on Google, and to answer two main questions: first, can one "refind" the same URI of a news story (for the same query) from Google after a given time? Second, what is the probability of finding a story on Google over a given period of time? To answer these questions, we issued seven queries to Google every day for over seven months (2017-05-25 to 2018-01-12) and collected links from the first five SERPs to generate seven collections for each query. The queries represent public interest stories: "healthcare bill," "manchester bombing," "london terrorism," "trump russia," "travel ban," "hurricane harvey," and "hurricane irma." We tracked each URI in all collections over time to estimate the discoverability of URIs from the first five SERPs. Our results showed that the daily average rate at which stories were replaced on the default Google SERP ranged from 0.21 - 0.54, and a weekly rate of 0.39 - 0.79, suggesting the fast replacement of older stories by newer stories. The probability of finding the same URI of a news story after one day from the initial appearance on the SERP ranged from 0.34 - 0.44. After a week, the probability of finding the same news stories diminishes rapidly to 0.01 - 0.11. In addition to the reporting of these probabilities, we also provide two predictive models for estimating the probability of finding the URI of an arbitrary news story on SERPs as a function of time. The web archiving community considers link rot and content drift important reasons for collection building. Similarly, our findings suggest that due to the difficulty in retrieving the URIs of news stories from Google, collection building that originates from search engines should begin as soon as possible in order to capture the first stages of events, and should persist in order to capture the evolution of the events, because it becomes more difficult to find the same news stories with the same queries on Google, as time progresses. Missing web pages, URIs that return the 404 "Page Not Found" error or the HTTP response code 200 but dereference unexpected content, are ubiquitous in today's browsing experience. We use Internet search engines to relocate such missing pages and provide means that help automate the rediscovery process. We propose querying web pages' titles against search engines. We investigate the retrieval performance of titles and compare them to lexical signatures which are derived from the pages' content. Since titles naturally represent the content of a document they intuitively change over time. We measure the edit distance between current titles and titles of copies of the same pages obtained from the Internet Archive and display their evolution. We further investigate the correlation between title changes and content modifications of a web page over time. Lastly we provide a predictive model for the quality of any given web page title in terms of its discovery performance. Our results show that titles return more than 60 URIs top ranked and further relevant content returned in the top 10 results. We show that titles decay slowly but are far more stable than the pages' content. We further distill stop titles than can help identify insufficiently performing search engine queries. The emergence of the web has fundamentally affected most aspects of information communication, including scholarly communication. The immediacy that characterizes publishing information to the web, as well as accessing it, allows for a dramatic increase in the speed of dissemination of scholarly knowledge. But, the transition from a paper-based to a web-based scholarly communication system also poses challenges. In this paper, we focus on reference rot, the combination of link rot and content drift to which references to web resources included in Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM) articles are subject. We investigate the extent to which reference rot impacts the ability to revisit the web context that surrounds STM articles some time after their publication. We do so on the basis of a vast collection of articles from three corpora that span publication years 1997 to 2012. For over one million references to web resources extracted from over 3.5 million articles, we determine whether the HTTP URI is still responsive on the live web and whether web archives contain an archived snapshot representative of the state the referenced resource had at the time it was referenced. We observe that the fraction of articles containing references to web resources is growing steadily over time. We find one out of five STM articles suffering from reference rot, meaning it is impossible to revisit the web context that surrounds them some time after their publication. When only considering STM articles that contain references to web resources, this fraction increases to seven out of ten. We suggest that, in order to safeguard the long-term integrity of the web-based scholarly record, robust solutions to combat the reference rot problem are required. In conclusion, we provide a brief insight into the directions that are explored with this regard in the context of the Hiberlink project.