Robots outnumber human sessions 10:1 in access logs from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The study analyzed over 2 million requests and found that robots accounted for 93% of filtered requests and 91% of sessions, but only 50% of raw requests. Robots mainly used the "dip" and "skim" access patterns to retrieve TimeMap data, while humans exhibited "dip" (39% of sessions) and "dive" (30% of sessions) patterns to access archived webpage content directly. The findings provide insight into how robots and humans differently interact with and retrieve information from web archives.

1. Access Patterns for Robots and Humans in Web Archives
Robot sessions outnumber human sessions 10:1 in the Internet Archive
Yasmin AlNoamany, Michele C. Weigle, and Michael L. Nelson
{yasmin, mweigle, mln}@cs.odu.edu
How do Users access Web Archives? Methodology
Although user patterns in the live web are well-understood, there has been no corresponding study of how Data Set: random sample of 2M requests from Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine access logs of Feb. 2,
users, both humans and robots, access web archives. 2012.
Abstract Models for Accessing Web Archives Robots vs Humans
User Raw Requests Filtered Requests Sessions MBs Transferred
Robots 1,002,573 (50.1%) 396,627 (93.0%) 34,203 (90.9%) 20,010
Humans 810,049 (40.5%) 29,690 (7.0%) 3,431 (9.1%) 4,459
Results
50
40
TimeMap
Memento
40
30
Percentage
30
20
20
10
10
0
0
Dip Dive Slide and Dive Skim Slide Dip Dive Slide & Dive Skim Slide
Robots Humans
Robots and humans exhibit different access patterns.
Conclusion
• Robots outnumber humans 10:1 in terms of sessions, 5:4 in terms of raw HTTP accesses, and 4:1
in terms of MB transferred.
• Robots mainly exhibit the Dip and Skim patterns, with about 49% of their sessions for each pattern,
and that they access TimeMaps almost exclusively.
• Humans exhibit the Dip pattern with 39% and Dive pattern with 30% of their sessions. Unlike
robots, humans mainly access archived pages rather than TimeMaps.
References
1- Access Patterns for Robots and Humans in Web Archives. Yasmin AlNomany, Michele C. Weigle and
Michael L. Nelson. IEEE/ACM Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, 2013.