research-article

“Way back then”: A Data-driven View of 25+ years of Web Evolution

Authors:

Vibhor Agarwal,

Nishanth SastryAuthors Info & Claims

WWW '22: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022

Pages 3471 - 3479

https://doi.org/10.1145/3485447.3512283

Published: 25 April 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Since the inception of the first web page three decades back, the Web has evolved considerably, from static HTML pages in the beginning to the dynamic web pages of today, from mainly the text-based pages of the 1990s to today’s multimedia rich pages, etc. Although much of this is known anecdotally, to our knowledge, there is no quantitative documentation of the extent and timing of these changes. This paper attempts to address this gap in the literature by looking at the top 100 Alexa websites for over 25 years from the Internet Archive or the “Wayback Machine”, archive.org. We study the changes in popularity, from Geocities and Yahoo! in the mid-to-late 1990s to the likes of Google, Facebook, and Tiktok of today. We also look at different categories of websites and their popularity over the years and find evidence for the decline in popularity of news and education-related websites, which have been replaced by streaming media and social networking sites. We explore the emergence and relative prevalence of different MIME-types (text vs. image vs. video vs. javascript and json) and study whether the use of text on the Internet is declining.

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Lim KPark JKim DChua TNgo CKa-Wei Lee RKumar RLauw H(2024)Phishing Vs. Legit: Comparative Analysis of Client-Side Resources of Phishing and Target Brand WebsitesProceedings of the ACM on Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645535(1756-1767)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589334.3645535
Hantke FCalzavara SWilhelm MRabitti AStock BMeng WJensen CCremers CKirda E(2023)You Call This Archaeology? Evaluating Web Archives for Reproducible Web Security MeasurementsProceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3576915.3616688(3168-3182)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3576915.3616688
Su ZHelles RAl-Laith AVeilahti ASaxena ASimonsen J(2023)Privacy Lost in Online Education: Analysis of Web Tracking EvolutionAdvanced Data Mining and Applications10.1007/978-3-031-46664-9_30(440-455)Online publication date: 27-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-46664-9_30

Index Terms

“Way back then”: A Data-driven View of 25+ years of Web Evolution

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

WWW '22: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022

April 2022

3764 pages

ISBN:9781450390965

DOI:10.1145/3485447

Editors:
Frédérique Laforest
INSA Lyon, France
,
Raphaël Troncy
EURECOM, France
,
Elena Simperl
King’s College London, UK
,
Deepak Agarwal
Pinterest, USA
,
Aristides Gionis
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
,
Ivan Herman
W3C / retired
,
Lionel Médini
Université Lyon 1, France

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Published: 25 April 2022

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Cited By

Lim KPark JKim DChua TNgo CKa-Wei Lee RKumar RLauw H(2024)Phishing Vs. Legit: Comparative Analysis of Client-Side Resources of Phishing and Target Brand WebsitesProceedings of the ACM on Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645535(1756-1767)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589334.3645535
Hantke FCalzavara SWilhelm MRabitti AStock BMeng WJensen CCremers CKirda E(2023)You Call This Archaeology? Evaluating Web Archives for Reproducible Web Security MeasurementsProceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3576915.3616688(3168-3182)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3576915.3616688
Su ZHelles RAl-Laith AVeilahti ASaxena ASimonsen J(2023)Privacy Lost in Online Education: Analysis of Web Tracking EvolutionAdvanced Data Mining and Applications10.1007/978-3-031-46664-9_30(440-455)Online publication date: 27-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-46664-9_30

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