Access Patterns for Robots and Humans in Web Archives

Abstract: Although user access patterns on the live web are well-understood, there has been no corresponding study of how users, both humans and robots, access web archives. Based on samples from the Internet Archive's public Wayback Machine, we propose a set of basic usage patterns: Dip (a single access), Slide (the same page at different archive times), Dive (different pages at approximately the same archive time), and Skim (lists of what pages are archived, i.e., TimeMaps). Robots are limited almost exclusively to Dips and Skims, but human accesses are more varied between all four types. Robots outnumber humans 10:1 in terms of sessions, 5:4 in terms of raw HTTP accesses, and 4:1 in terms of megabytes transferred. Robots almost always access TimeMaps (95% of accesses), but humans predominately access the archived web pages themselves (82% of accesses). In terms of unique archived web pages, there is no overall preference for a particular time, but the recent past (within the last year) shows significant repeat accesses.