Web page change and persistence—A four‐year longitudinal study

Wallace Koehler

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2002, vol. 53, issue 2, 162-171

Abstract: Changes in the topography of the Web can be expressed in at least four ways: (1) more sites on more servers in more places, (2) more pages and objects added to existing sites and pages, (3) changes in traffic, and (4) modifications to existing text, graphic, and other Web objects. This article does not address the first three factors (more sites, more pages, more traffic) in the growth of the Web. It focuses instead on changes to an existing set of Web documents. The article documents changes to an aging set of Web pages, first identified and “collected” in December 1996 and followed weekly thereafter. Results are reported through February 2001. The article addresses two related phenomena: (1) the life cycle of Web objects, and (2) changes to Web objects. These data reaffirm that the half‐life of a Web page is approximately 2years. There is variation among Web pages by top‐level domain and by page type (navigation, content). Web page content appears to stabilize over time; aging pages change less often than once they did.

Date: 2002
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.10018

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jamist:v:53:y:2002:i:2:p:162-171

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://doi.org/10.1002/(ISSN)1532-2890

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology from Association for Information Science & Technology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().