Using Google to Calculate Web Decay

scottennis writes: "Google has yet another application: measuring the rate of decay of information on the web. By plotting the number of results at 3,6, and 12 months for a series of phrases, this study claims to have uncovered a corresponding 60-70-80 percent decay rate. Essentially, 60% of the web changes every 3 months." You may be amused by some of the phrases he notes as exceptional, too.

Comments

Not exactly decay...

[QuantumFTL]

It seems to me that in a way, the web is like an organism, whose smaller constituents are constantly (or not so constantly, depending on the webmaster) renewing themselves. It's a truely adaptive medium, and thus drastic change in short times like this as interest shifts should be quite expected.

That said, this is one of the many ways in which Google is an invaluable tool for research. Not just finding information, but generating it. Thanks Google!

Web Death

[svwolfpack]

It would also be interesting to see how much of the web no longer exists... like at what rate the web is dying. God knows there's enough dead links out there...

Re:Web Death

[Enocasiones]

Educators and "link rot".

In a paper to be published in the June issue of the Journal of Science Education and Technology, Brooks and Markwell likened the rate of link rot to the type of "extinction equation" commonly used to describe natural processes such as radioactive decay. They wrote that the hyperlinks in their study had an expected "half-life" of 55 months."

Also this, which is just a link from the previous article.

Easy! :)

(web's half-life -game -unreal -counter -gamers)

Study: World Wide Web sites and page persistence

[Seth Finkelstein]

For a more extensive (although older) study, take a look at

Digital libraries and World Wide Web sites and page persistence

That said, the Web and its component parts are dynamic. Web documents undergo two kinds of change. The first type, the type addressed in this paper, is "persistence" or the existence or disappearance of Web pages and sites, or in a word the lifecycle of Web documents. "Intermittence" is a variant of persistence, and is defined as the disappearance but reappearance of Web documents. At any given time, about five percent of Web pages are intermittent, which is to say they are gone but will return. Over time a Web collection erodes. Based on a 120-week longitudinal study of a sample of Web documents, it appears that the half-life of a Web page is somewhat less than two years and the half-life of a Web site is somewhat more than two years. That is to say, an unweeded Web document collection created two years ago would contain the same number of URLs, but only half of those URLs point to content. The second type of change Web documents experience is change in Web page or Web site content. Again based on the Web document samples, very nearly all Web pages and sites undergo some form of content within the period of a year. Some change content very rapidly while others do so infrequently (Koehler, 1999a). This paper examines how Web documents can be efficiently and effectively incorporated into library collections. This paper focuses on Web document lifecycles: persistence, attrition, and intermittence.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

Better article needed

[Raedwald]

I'm not impressed. The article does not define what he means by decay, or how he measured it, except in the vaguest of terms. The analysis of the data is poor; anyone interested in decay would suspect some kind of exponential decay. They would therefore plot the data logarithmically, and perhaps calcualte a half life. Piss poor.

Re:bill gates sucks...

[Kierthos]

Actually (and unfortunately for any haters of the Evil that lies in the lands of Redmond) Headline News had this lovely little chart on recently, which showed public approval of several companies. Enron and Arthur Anderson had 9 and 11% approval ratings, respectively, while the big "winner" was Microsoft, with something like a 79% approval rating.

Let's face facts here. We might hate Microsoft, but the vast majority of people do not. Good? Bad? Indifferent?

Kierthos

Wide jump from findings to conclusion

[gpmart]

In fact, I would argue that good content need not change. Aside from the obvious issues with the small sampling of phrases, the web is, thankfully, not just a series of catch-phrases. In fact, it was designed to carry complex information such that it could not be reduced.

What scares me here is the conclusion that web sites need to change their content 60% every 3 months. This is not freshness, this is reorganizing to re-organize. If you are considering doing this, you had better seriously re-consider your future. Its an interesting study but a good meme doesn't die simply because the catch-phrases are tired.

At faculty meetings at our school I sit with a bingo card. On it are a series of catch-phrases. We listen for the catch-phrases and shout out when we have finished our cards. B***SH*T is the game and to reduce your content to a series of reorganized catch-phrases is like having a marketing guy develop foreign policy.

Anyone willing to write the perl module that searches for the latest catch-phrases and inserts them randomly into your web content. Yeesh!