Focused Crawl of Web Archives to Build Event Collections

TL;DR

This paper explores the feasibility of using focused web crawling on archived web data via Memento infrastructure to build relevant event collections, especially for past events, comparing it to live web crawling.

Contribution

It demonstrates that focused crawling on archived web data is feasible and effective for constructing relevant event collections, particularly for historical events.

Findings

Focused crawling on archived web is feasible.

Archived web crawling yields highly relevant event collections.

Effectiveness increases for events further in the past.

Abstract

Event collections are frequently built by crawling the live web on the basis of seed URIs nominated by human experts. Focused web crawling is a technique where the crawler is guided by reference content pertaining to the event. Given the dynamic nature of the web and the pace with which topics evolve, the timing of the crawl is a concern for both approaches. We investigate the feasibility of performing focused crawls on the archived web. By utilizing the Memento infrastructure, we obtain resources from 22 web archives that contribute to building event collections. We create collections on four events and compare the relevance of their resources to collections built from crawling the live web as well as from a manually curated collection. Our results show that focused crawling on the archived web can be done and indeed results in highly relevant collections, especially for events that happened further in the past.