This document analyzes access patterns for robots and humans on web archives. It finds that English pages are the most requested, followed by European languages. Most human sessions come to the Wayback Machine via referrals, led by Wikipedia, the Internet Archive homepage, Reddit, and Google. The analysis also shows that most links from outside archives go to past versions ("mementos") of pages, and 83% of linked mementos no longer exist on the live web. The study provides insights into what content languages users look for and how people discover and link to archived web pages.

1. Who and What Links to the
Internet Archive
Yasmin AlNoamany, Ahmed AlSum, Michele C. Weigle, Michael L. Nelson
Computer Science Department
Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA
yasmin@cs.odu.edu

2. 2Access Patterns for Robots and Humans in Web Archives
Motivation
• No prior study has answered the following
questions:
– What do web archive users look for in terms of
the content language of requested pages?
– How do people reach web archives?
– Who links to web archives?
– How do sites link to web archives?
– Why do sites link to the past?

3. 3Access Patterns for Robots and Humans in Web Archives
Dataset Sampling

4. 4Access Patterns for Robots and Humans in Web Archives
English pages are the most, followed
by the European languages

5. 5Access Patterns for Robots and Humans in Web Archives
European languages represent 22% of
the Unarchived requested pages

6. 6Access Patterns for Robots and Humans in Web Archives
Most languages self-link

7. 7Access Patterns for Robots and Humans in Web Archives
82% of human sessions connect to
the Wayback Machine via referrals
WebSite Percentage Description
en.wikipedia.org 12.9% Wikipedia
archive.org 11.9% IA Home Page
reddit.com 10.2% Social News Web Site
google.TLD 9.9% Search Engine
info-poland.bualo.edu 1.5% Polish Studies
de.wikipedia.org 1.4% Wikipedia
cracked.com 1.2% Humor Site
snopes.com 1.1% Urban Legends Reference Pages
facebook.com 0.9% Social Media
crochetpatterncentral.com 0.9% Crocheting Hobbies

8. 8Access Patterns for Robots and Humans in Web Archives
Most of the links (86%) are to
mementos

9. 9Access Patterns for Robots and Humans in Web Archives
83% of the mementos that have links
from outside the archive do not currently
exist on the live web

10. 10Access Patterns for Robots and Humans in Web Archives
Conclusions
• We provided analysis of the distributions of languages
to gain insight about what users look for on the
Wayback Machine
– English is the most used language, followed by many
European languages
– The languages are linking mainly to themselves and to
English
• We provided analysis for the human referrers to
discover where Wayback Machine users come from:
– 86% of the referrer web pages link deeply to mementos
– More than 82% of the links to these mementos are
because their corresponding URI-Rs do not exist on the live
web