Modeling Updates of Scholarly Webpages Using Archived Data

Yasith Jayawardana, Alexander C. Nwala, Gavindya Jayawardena, Jian Wu, Sampath Jayarathna, Michael L. Nelson, C. Lee Giles

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

The vastness of the web imposes a prohibitive cost on building large-scale search engines with limited resources. Crawl frontiers thus need to be optimized to improve the coverage and freshness of crawled content. In this paper, we propose an approach for modeling the dynamics of change in the web using archived copies of webpages. To evaluate its utility, we conduct a preliminary study on the scholarly web using 19,977 seed URLs of authors' homepages obtained from their Google Scholar profiles. We first obtain archived copies of these webpages from the Internet Archive (IA), and estimate when their actual updates occurred. Next, we apply maximum likelihood to estimate their mean update frequency (λ) values. Our evaluation shows that λ values derived from a short history of archived data provide a good estimate for the true update frequency in the short-term, and that our method provides better estimations of updates at a fraction of resources compared to the baseline models. Based on this, we demonstrate the utility of archived data to optimize the crawling strategy of web crawlers, and uncover important challenges that inspire future research directions.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2020
EditorsXintao Wu, Chris Jermaine, Li Xiong, Xiaohua Tony Hu, Olivera Kotevska, Siyuan Lu, Weijia Xu, Srinivas Aluru, Chengxiang Zhai, Eyhab Al-Masri, Zhiyuan Chen, Jeff Saltz
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages1868-1877
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781728162515
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 10 2020
Event8th IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2020 - Virtual, Atlanta, United States
Duration: Dec 10 2020Dec 13 2020

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2020

Conference

Conference8th IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2020
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVirtual, Atlanta
Period12/10/2012/13/20

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems
  • Information Systems and Management
  • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality

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