Paper Info
Title
Sic transit gloria telae: towards an understanding of the web's decay
Abstract
The rapid growth of the web has been noted and tracked extensively. Recent studies have however documented the dual phenomenon: web pages have small half lives, and thus the web exhibits rapid death as well. Consequently, page creators are faced with an increasingly burdensome task of keeping links up-to-date, and many are falling behind. In addition to just individual pages, collections of pages or even entire neighborhoods of the web exhibit significant decay, rendering them less effective as information resources. Such neighborhoods are identified only by frustrated searchers, seeking a way out of these stale neighborhoods, back to more up-to-date sections of the web; measuring the decay of a page purely on the basis of dead links on the page is too naive to reflect this frustration. In this paper we formalize a strong notion of a decay measure and present algorithms for computing it efficiently. We explore this measure by presenting a number of validations, and use it to identify interesting artifacts on today's web. We then describe a number of applications of such a measure to search engines, web page maintainers, ontologists, and individual users.
Year
DOI
Venue
2004
10.1145/988672.988716
WWW
Keywords
Field
DocType
up-to-date section,page creator,web page,sic transit gloria tela,web page maintainers,rapid growth,web exhibit significant decay,individual user,decay measure,individual page,rapid death,link analysis,search engine,web pages
Web development,Web design,Web search engine,World Wide Web,Web page,Computer science,Web analytics,Data Web,Web navigation,Backlink
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
1-58113-844-X
73
3.49
References 
Authors
20
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ziv Bar-Yossef11776118.00
Andrei Broder27357920.20
Ravi Kumar3139321642.48
Andrew Tomkins493881401.23