Models of Dynamic Web Content

Web pages are created, modified and removed at unspecified times by their owners. The frequency and extent of changes to Web pages vary across sites and across pages within sites. These changes influence the quality of the information retrieved from the Web and to some extent the delays experienced by the users. Our study focuses on the analysis of a news Web site with the objective of modeling the dynamic behavior of its content. We identify weekly and daily patterns in the page creation and update processes and we analyze the degree of change of the content of the pages. The study shows that many new pages were created every day, whereas existing pages but front pages, were updated few times and typically to a limited extent.