Duration of web pages

[Marc Davis]

There was a brief discussion a while back about the life of the "average"
web page.  I ran across an article by David Brake titled "Lost in
Cyberspace" in The New Scientist that included the following:
"Maintaining the quality of a search engine's index is made especially
difficult by the Web's volatility. A random sampling of pages on 2000
sites over three months in 1995, carried out by two US universities as 
part of research into a new indexing system, indicated that the average
time a page of text remained unchanged on the Web was just 75 days. A
substantial percentage changed every 10 days or less. Sometimes pages
disappeared entirely, but more often the information they contained was
simply updated, or the page was moved to a different address." 

The entire article, including hyperlink to the cited research, is at:

http://www.newscientist.com/keysites/networld/lost.html


Marc W. Davis                             davis at revelation.unomaha.edu
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