2023/04/30 by Lesley Frew, Michael L. Nelson, Frew, Lesley +3 · 1 voice · 1 citation
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · #Data Quality and Management #Digital Libraries (cs.DL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #H.3.3 #H.3.7 #Information Retrieval (cs.IR) #Web Data Mining and Analysis #cs.DL #cs.IR
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2305.00546
openalex publication_date 2023/04/30 · arxiv published 2023/04/30 · arxiv updated 2023/04/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Webpages change over time, and web archives hold copies of historical versions of webpages. Users of web archives, such as journalists, want to find and view changes on webpages over time. However, the current search interfaces for web archives do not support this task. For the web archives that include a full-text search feature, multiple versions of the same webpage that match the search query are shown individually without enumerating changes, or are grouped together in a way that hides changes. We present a change text search engine that allows users to find changes in webpages. We describe the implementation of the search engine backend and frontend, including a tool that allows users to view the changes between two webpage versions in context as an animation. We evaluate the search engine with U.S. federal environmental webpages that changed between 2016 and 2020. The change text search results page can clearly show when terms and phrases were added or removed from webpages. The inverted index can also be queried to identify salient and frequently deleted terms in a corpus.