Discovering empirical laws of Web dynamics

The World Wide Web is a complex system that changes over time. However, like any dynamic system, we can attempt to understand it in scientific terms and describe regularities in its behavior. To this end, we have collected measurements for a number of Web-related variables, including the daily changes in Web pages. To the resulting data, we have applied RF6, an algorithm that discovers descriptive laws in the form of polynomial expressions that hold under conditions on nominal variables. Applying this technique to the collected data has produced some initial laws of Web dynamics that encourage further research along these lines.