This is another post in a series that I’ve been doing to compare the End of Term Web Archives from 2008 and 2012.  If you look back a few posts in this blog you will see some other analysis that I’ve done with the datasets so far.

One thing that I am interested in understanding is how well the group that conducted the EOT crawls did in relation to what I’m calling “curator intent”.  For both the EOT archives suggested seeds were collected using instances of the URL Nomination Tool hosted by the UNT Libraries. A combination of bulk lists of seeds URLs collected by various institutions and individuals were combined individual nominations made by users of the nomination tool.  The resulting lists were used as seed lists for the crawlers that were used to harvest the EOT archives.  In 2008 there were four institutions that crawled content,  the Internet Archive (IA), Library of Congress (LOC), California Digital Library (CDL), and the UNT Libraries (UNT).  In 2012 CDL was not able to do any crawling so just IA, LOC and UNT crawled.  UNT and LOC had limited scope in what they were interested in crawling while CDL and IA took the entire seed list and used that to feed their crawlers.  The crawlers were scoped very wide so that they would get as much content as they could, so the nomination seeds were used as starting places and we allowed the crawlers to go to all subdomains and paths on those sites as well as to areas that the sites linked to on other domains.

During the capture period there wasn’t consistent quality control performed for the crawls, we accepted what we could get and went on with our business.

Looking back at the crawling that we did I was curious of two things.

1. How many of the domain names from the nomination tool were not present in the EOT archive.
2. How many domains from .gov and .mil were captured but not explicitly nominated.

EOT2008 Nominated vs Captured Domains.

In the 2008 nominated URL list form the URL Nomination Tool there were a total of 1,252 domains with 1,194 being either .gov or .mil.  In the EOT2008 archive there were a total of 87,889 domains and 1,647 of those were either .gov or .mil.

There are 943 domains that are present in both the 2008 nomination list and the EOT2008 archive.  There are 251 .gov or .mil domains from the nomination list that were not present in the EOT2008 archive. There are 704 .gov or .mil domains that are present in the EOT2008 archive but that aren’t present in the 2008 nomination list.

Below is a chart showing the nominated vs captured for the .gov and .mil

Of those 704 domains that were captured but never nominated, here are the thirty most prolific.

Domain	URLs
womenshealth.gov	168,559
dccourts.gov	161,289
acquisition.gov	102,568
america.gov	89,610
cfo.gov	83,846
kingcounty.gov	61,069
pa.gov	42,955
dc.gov	28,839
inl.gov	23,881
nationalservice.gov	22,096
defenseimagery.mil	21,922
recovery.gov	17,601
wa.gov	14,259
louisiana.gov	12,942
mo.gov	12,570
ky.gov	11,668
delaware.gov	10,124
michigan.gov	9,322
invasivespeciesinfo.gov	8,566
virginia.gov	8,520
alabama.gov	6,709
ct.gov	6,498
idaho.gov	6,046
ri.gov	5,810
kansas.gov	5,672
vermont.gov	5,504
arkansas.gov	5,424
wi.gov	4,938
illinois.gov	4,322
maine.gov	3,956

I see quite a few state and local governments that have a .gov domain which was out of scope of the EOT project but there are also a number of legitimate domains in the list that were never nominated.

EOT2012 Nominated vs Captured Domains.

In the 2012 nominated URL list form the URL Nomination Tool there were a total of 1,674 domains with 1,551 of those being .gov or .mil domains.  In the EOT2012 archive there were a total of 186,214 domains and 1,944 of those were either .gov or .mil.

There are 1,343 domains that are present in both the 2008 nomination list and the EOT2012 archive.  There are 208 .gov or .mil domains from the nomination list that were not present in the EOT2012 archive. There are 601 .gov or .mil domains that are present in the EOT2012 archive but that aren’t present in the 2012 nomination list.

Below is a chart showing the nominated vs captured for the .gov and .mil

Of those 601 domains that were captured but never nominated, here are the thirty most prolific.

Domain	URLs
gao.gov	952,654
vaccines.mil	856,188
esgr.mil	212,741
fdlp.gov	156,499
copyright.gov	70,281
congress.gov	40,338
openworld.gov	31,929
americaslibrary.gov	18,415
digitalpreservation.gov	17,327
majorityleader.gov	15,931
sanjoseca.gov	10,830
utah.gov	9,387
dc.gov	9,063
nyc.gov	8,707
ng.mil	8,199
ny.gov	8,185
wa.gov	8,126
in.gov	8,011
vermont.gov	7,683
maryland.gov	7,612
medicalmuseum.mil	7,135
usbg.gov	6,724
virginia.gov	6,437
wv.gov	6,188
compliance.gov	6,181
mo.gov	6,030
idaho.gov	5,880
nv.gov	5,709
ct.gov	5,628
ne.gov	5,414

Again there are a number of state and local government domains present in the list but up at the top we see quite a few URLs harvested from domains that are federal in nature and would fit into the collection scope for the EOT project.

How did we do?

The way that seed lists for the nomination tool were collected for the EOT2008 and EOT2012 nomination lists introduced a bit of dirty data.  We would need to look a little deeper to see what the issues were with these. Some things that come to mind are that we got seeds from domains that existed prior to 2008 or 2012 but that didn’t exist when we were harvesting.  Also there could have been typos in the URLs that were nominated so we never grabbed the suggested content.  We might want to introduce a validate process for the nomination tool that let’s us know what that status of a URL in a project is at a given point so that we can at least have some sort of record.

 

 

 

13% to 10%

This is the fourth post in a series that looks at the End of Term Web Archives captured in 2008 and 2012.  In previous posts I’ve looked at the when, what, and where of these archives.  In doing so I pulled together the domain names from each of the archives to compare them.

My thought was that I could look at which domains had content in the EOT2008 or EOT2012 and compare these domains to get some very high level idea of what content was around in 2008 but was completely gone in 2012.  Likewise I could look at new content domains that appeared since 2008.  For this post I’m limiting my view to just the domains that end in .gov or .mil because they are generally the focus of these web archiving projects.

Comparing EOT2008 and EOT2012

The are 1,647 unique domain names in the EOT2008 archive and 1,944 unique domain names in the EOT2012 archive, which is an increase of 18%. Between the two archives there are 1,236 domain names that are common.  There are 411 domains that exist in the EOT2008 that are not present in EOT2012, and 708 new domains in EOT2012 that didn’t exist in EOT2008.

The EOT2008 dataset consists of 160,212,141 URIs and the EOT2012 dataset comes in at 194,066,940 URIs.  When you look at the URLs in the 411 domains that are present in EOT2008 and missing in EOT2012 you get 3,784,308 which is just 2% of the total number of URLs.  When you look at the EOT2012 domains that were only present in 2012 compared to 2008 you see 5,562,840 URLs (3%) that were harvested from domains that only existed in the EOT2012 archive.

The thirty domains with the most URLs captured for them that were present in the EOT2008 collection that weren’t present in EOT2012 are listed in the table below.

Domain	Count
geodata.gov	812,524
nifl.gov	504,910
stat-usa.gov	398,961
tradestatsexpress.gov	243,729
arnet.gov	174,057
acqnet.gov	171,493
dccourts.gov	161,289
web-services.gov	137,202
metrokc.gov	132,210
sdi.gov	91,887
davie-fl.gov	88,123
belmont.gov	87,332
aftac.gov	84,507
careervoyages.gov	57,192
women-21.gov	56,255
egrpra.gov	54,775
4women.gov	45,684
4woman.gov	42,192
nypa.gov	36,099
nhmfl.gov	27,569
darpa.gov	21,454
usafreedomcorps.gov	18,001
peacecore.gov	17,744
californiadesert.gov	15,172
arpa.gov	15,093
okgeosurvey1.gov	14,595
omhrc.gov	14,594
usafreedomcorp.gov	14,298
uscva.gov	13,627
odci.gov	12,920

The thirty domains with the most URLs from EOT2012 that weren’t present in EOT2012.

Domain	Count
militaryonesource.mil	859,843
consumerfinance.gov	237,361
nrd.gov	194,215
wh.gov	179,233
pnnl.gov	132,994
eia.gov	112,034
transparency.gov	109,039
nationalguard.mil	108,854
acus.gov	93,810
404.gov	82,409
savingsbondwizard.gov	76,867
treasuryhunt.gov	76,394
fedshirevets.gov	75,529
onrr.gov	75,484
veterans.gov	75,350
broadbandmap.gov	72,889
saferproducts.gov	65,387
challenge.gov	63,808
healthdata.gov	63,105
marinecadastre.gov	62,882
fatherhood.gov	62,132
edpubs.gov	58,356
transportationresearch.gov	58,235
cbca.gov	56,043
usbonds.gov	55,102
usbond.gov	54,847
phe.gov	53,626
ussavingsbond.gov	53,563
scienceeducation.gov	53,468
mda.gov	53,010

Shared domains that changed

There were a number of domains (1,236) that are present in both the EOT2008 and EOT2012 archives.  I thought it would be interesting to compare those domains and see which ones changed the most.  Below are the fifty shared domains that changed the most between EOT2008 and EOT2012.

Domain	EOT2008	EOT2012	Change	Absolute Change	% Change
house.gov	13,694,187	35,894,356	22,200,169	22,200,169	162%
senate.gov	5,043,974	9,924,917	4,880,943	4,880,943	97%
gpo.gov	8,705,511	3,888,645	-4,816,866	4,816,866	-55%
nih.gov	5,276,262	1,267,764	-4,008,498	4,008,498	-76%
nasa.gov	6,693,542	3,063,382	-3,630,160	3,630,160	-54%
navy.mil	94,081	3,611,722	3,517,641	3,517,641	3,739%
usgs.gov	4,896,493	1,690,295	-3,206,198	3,206,198	-65%
loc.gov	5,059,848	7,587,179	2,527,331	2,527,331	50%
hhs.gov	2,361,866	366,024	-1,995,842	1,995,842	-85%
osd.mil	180,046	2,111,791	1,931,745	1,931,745	1,073%
af.mil	230,920	2,067,812	1,836,892	1,836,892	795%
ed.gov	2,334,548	510,413	-1,824,135	1,824,135	-78%
lanl.gov	2,081,275	309,007	-1,772,268	1,772,268	-85%
usda.gov	2,892,923	1,324,049	-1,568,874	1,568,874	-54%
congress.gov	1,554,199	40,338	-1,513,861	1,513,861	-97%
noaa.gov	5,317,872	3,985,633	-1,332,239	1,332,239	-25%
epa.gov	1,628,517	327,810	-1,300,707	1,300,707	-80%
uscourts.gov	1,484,240	184,507	-1,299,733	1,299,733	-88%
dol.gov	1,387,724	88,557	-1,299,167	1,299,167	-94%
census.gov	1,604,505	328,014	-1,276,491	1,276,491	-80%
dot.gov	1,703,935	554,325	-1,149,610	1,149,610	-67%
usbg.gov	1,026,360	6,724	-1,019,636	1,019,636	-99%
doe.gov	1,164,955	268,694	-896,261	896,261	-77%
vaccines.mil	5,665	856,188	850,523	850,523	15,014%
fdlp.gov	991,747	156,499	-835,248	835,248	-84%
uspto.gov	980,215	155,428	-824,787	824,787	-84%
bts.gov	921,756	130,730	-791,026	791,026	-86%
cdc.gov	1,014,213	264,500	-749,713	749,713	-74%
lbl.gov	743,472	4,080	-739,392	739,392	-99%
faa.gov	945,446	206,500	-738,946	738,946	-78%
treas.gov	838,243	99,411	-738,832	738,832	-88%
fema.gov	903,393	172,055	-731,338	731,338	-81%
clinicaltrials.gov	919,490	196,642	-722,848	722,848	-79%
army.mil	2,228,691	2,936,308	707,617	707,617	32%
nsf.gov	760,976	65,880	-695,096	695,096	-91%
prc.gov	740,176	75,682	-664,494	664,494	-90%
doc.gov	823,825	173,538	-650,287	650,287	-79%
fueleconomy.gov	675,522	79,943	-595,579	595,579	-88%
nbii.gov	577,708	391	-577,317	577,317	-100%
defense.gov	687	575,776	575,089	575,089	83,710%
usajobs.gov	3,487	551,217	547,730	547,730	15,708%
sandia.gov	736,032	210,429	-525,603	525,603	-71%
nps.gov	706,323	191,102	-515,221	515,221	-73%
defenselink.mil	502,023	1,868	-500,155	500,155	-100%
fws.gov	625,180	132,402	-492,778	492,778	-79%
ssa.gov	609,784	125,781	-484,003	484,003	-79%
archives.gov	654,689	175,585	-479,104	479,104	-73%
fnal.gov	575,167	1,051,926	476,759	476,759	83%
change.gov	486,798	24,820	-461,978	461,978	-95%
buyusa.gov	490,179	37,053	-453,126	453,126	-92%

Only 11 of the 50 (22%) resulted in more content harvested in EOT2012 than EOT2012.

Of the eleven domains that had more content harvested for them in EOT2012 there were five navy.mil, osd.mil, vaccines.mil, defense.gov, and usajobs.gov that increased by over 1,000% in the amount of content.  I don’t know if this is necessarily a result in an increase in attention to these sites, more content on the sites, or a different organization of the sites that made them easier to harvest.  I suspect it is some combination of all three of those things.

Summary

It should be expected that there are going to be domains that come into and go out of existence on a regular basis in a large web space like the federal government.  One of the things that I think is rather challenging to identify is a list of domains that were present at one given time within an organization.  For example “what domains did the federal government have in 1998?”.  It seems like a way to come up with that answer is to use web archives. We see based on the analysis in this post that there are 411 domains that were present in 2008 that we weren’t able to capture in 2012.  Take a look at that list of the top thirty,  did you recognize any of those? How many other initiatives, committees, agencies, task forces, and citizen education portals existed at one point that are now gone?

If you have questions or comments about this post,  please let me know via Twitter.

This post carries on in the analysis of the End of Term web archives for 2008 and 2012. Previous posts in this series discuss when content was harvested and what kind of content was harvested and included in the archives.

In this post we will look at where content came from, specifically the data held in the top level domains, domain names and sub-domain names.

Top Level Domains

The first thing to look at is the top level domains for all of the URLs in the CDX files.

In the EOT2008 archive there are a total of 241 unique TLDs.  In the EOT2012 archive there are a total of 251 unique TLDs.  This is a modest increase of 4.15% from EOT2008 to EOT2012.

The EOT2008 and EOT2012 archives share 225 TLDs between the two archives.  There are 16 TLDs that are unique to the EOT2008 archive and 26 TLDs that are unique to the EOT2012 archive.

TLDs unique to EOT2008

Unique to 2008	URLs from TLD
null	18,772
www	583
yu	357
labs	20
webteam	16
cg	10
security	8
ssl	8
b	8
css	7
web	6
dev	4
education	4
misc	2
secure	2
campaigns	2

TLDs unique to EOT2012

Unique to 2012	URLs from TLD
whois	17,500
io	7,935
pn	987
sy	541
lr	478
so	418
nr	363
tf	291
xxx	258
re	186
xn--p1ai	171
bi	153
dm	120
tel	78
ck	65
ax	64
sx	54
tg	50
ki	48
gg	25
kn	25
gp	24
pm	20
fk	18
cf	7
wf	3

I believe that the “null” TLD from EOT2008 is an artifact of the crawling process and possibly represents rows in the CDX file that correspond to metadata records in the warc/arcs from 2008.  I will have to do some digging to confirm.

Change in TLD

Next up we take a look at the 225 TLDs that are shared between the archives. First up are the fifteen most changed based on the increase or decrease in the number of URLs from that TLD

TLD	eot2008	eot2012	Change	Absolute Change	% change
com	7,809,711	45,594,482	37,784,771	37,784,771	483.8%
gov	137,829,050	109,141,353	-28,687,697	28,687,697	-20.8%
mil	3,555,425	16,223,861	12,668,436	12,668,436	356.3%
net	653,187	9,269,406	8,616,219	8,616,219	1319.1%
edu	3,552,509	2,442,626	-1,109,883	1,109,883	-31.2%
int	135,939	685,168	549,229	549,229	404.0%
uk	70,262	594,020	523,758	523,758	745.4%
ly	95	503,457	503,362	503,362	529854.7%
org	5,108,645	5,588,750	480,105	480,105	9.4%
us	840,516	474,156	-366,360	366,360	-43.6%
co	2,839	211,131	208,292	208,292	7336.8%
be	4,019	203,178	199,159	199,159	4955.4%
jp	23,896	220,602	196,706	196,706	823.2%
me	35	182,963	182,928	182,928	522651.4%
tv	10,373	191,736	181,363	181,363	1748.4%

Interesting is the change in the first two.  There was an increase of over 37 million URLs (484%) for the com TDL between EOT2008 and EOT2012.  There was also a decrease (-21%) or over 28 million URLs for the gov TLD.  The mil TLD also increased by 356% between the EOT2008 and EOT2012 harvests with an increase of over 12 million URLs.

You can see that .ly and .me increased by some serious percentage,  529,855% and 522,651% respectively.

Taking a look at just the percent of change, here are the five most changed based on that percentage

TLD	eot2008	eot2012	Change	Absolute Change	% change
ly	95	503,457	503,362	503,362	529854.7%
me	35	182,963	182,928	182,928	522651.4%
gl	129	49,733	49,604	49,604	38452.7%
gd	9	3,273	3,264	3,264	36266.7%
cat	43	11,703	11,660	11,660	27116.3%

I have a feeling that at the majority of the ly, me, gl, and gd TLD content came in as redirect URLs from link shortening services.

Domain Names

There are 87,889 unique domain names in the EOT2008 archive, this increases dramatically in the EOT2012 archive to 186,214 which is an increase of 118% in the number of domain names.

There are 30,066 domain names that are shared between the two archives.  There are 57,823 domain names that are unique to the EOT2008 archive and 156.148 domain names that are unique to the EOT2012 archive.

Here is a table showing thirty of the domains that were only present in the EOT2008 archive ordered by the number of URLs from that domain.

TLD	Count
geodata.gov	812,524
nifl.gov	504,910
stat-usa.gov	398,961
tradestatsexpress.gov	243,729
arnet.gov	174,057
acqnet.gov	171,493
dccourts.gov	161,289
meish.org	147,261
web-services.gov	137,202
metrokc.gov	132,210
sdi.gov	91,887
davie-fl.gov	88,123
belmont.gov	87,332
aftac.gov	84,507
careervoyages.gov	57,192
women-21.gov	56,255
egrpra.gov	54,775
4women.gov	45,684
4woman.gov	42,192
nypa.gov	36,099
secure-banking.com	33,059
nhmfl.gov	27,569
darpa.gov	21,454
usafreedomcorps.gov	18,001
peacecore.gov	17,744
californiadesert.gov	15,172
federaljudgesassoc.org	15,126
arpa.gov	15,093
transportationfortomorrow.org	14,926
okgeosurvey1.gov	14,595

Here is the same kind of table but this time for the EOT2012 dataset.

TLD	Count
militaryonesource.mil	859,843
yfrog.com	682,664
staticflickr.com	640,606
akamaihd.net	384,769
4sqi.net	350,707
foursquare.com	340,492
adf.ly	334,767
pinterest.com	244,293
consumerfinance.gov	237,361
nrd.gov	194,215
wh.gov	179,233
t.co	175,033
youtu.be	172,301
sndcdn.com	161,039
pnnl.gov	132,994
eia.gov	112,034
transparency.gov	109,039
nationalguard.mil	108,854
acus.gov	93,810
nrsc.org	85,925
mzstatic.com	84,202
404.gov	82,409
savingsbondwizard.gov	76,867
treasuryhunt.gov	76,394
mynextmove.org	75,927
fedshirevets.gov	75,529
onrr.gov	75,484
veterans.gov	75,350
broadbandmap.gov	72,889
ntm-a.com	71,126

Those are pretty long tables but I think they start to point at some interesting things from this analysis.  The domains that were present and harvested in 2008 and that weren’t harvested in 2012.  In looking at the list, some of them (metrokc.gov, davie-fl.gov, okgeosurvey1.gov) were most likely out of scope for “Federal Web” but got captured because of the gov TLD.

In the EOT2012 list you start to see artifacts from an increase in attention to social media site capture for the EOT2012 project.  Sites like yfrog.com, staticflickr.com, adf.ly, t.co, youtu.be, foursquare.com, pintrest.com probably came from that increased attention.

Here is a list of the twenty most changed domains from EOT2008 to EOT2012.  This number is based on the absolute change in the number of URLs captured for each of the archives.

Domain	EOT2008	EOT2012	Change	Abolute Change	% Change
house.gov	13,694,187	35,894,356	22,200,169	22,200,169	162%
facebook.com	11,895	7,503,640	7,491,745	7,491,745	62,982%
dvidshub.net	1,097	5,612,410	5,611,313	5,611,313	511,514%
senate.gov	5,043,974	9,924,917	4,880,943	4,880,943	97%
gpo.gov	8,705,511	3,888,645	-4,816,866	4,816,866	-55%
nih.gov	5,276,262	1,267,764	-4,008,498	4,008,498	-76%
nasa.gov	6,693,542	3,063,382	-3,630,160	3,630,160	-54%
navy.mil	94,081	3,611,722	3,517,641	3,517,641	3,739%
usgs.gov	4,896,493	1,690,295	-3,206,198	3,206,198	-65%
loc.gov	5,059,848	7,587,179	2,527,331	2,527,331	50%
flickr.com	157,155	2,286,890	2,129,735	2,129,735	1,355%
youtube.com	346,272	2,369,108	2,022,836	2,022,836	584%
hhs.gov	2,361,866	366,024	-1,995,842	1,995,842	-85%
osd.mil	180,046	2,111,791	1,931,745	1,931,745	1,073%
af.mil	230,920	2,067,812	1,836,892	1,836,892	795%
ed.gov	2,334,548	510,413	-1,824,135	1,824,135	-78%
granicus.com	782	1,785,724	1,784,942	1,784,942	228,253%
lanl.gov	2,081,275	309,007	-1,772,268	1,772,268	-85%
usda.gov	2,892,923	1,324,049	-1,568,874	1,568,874	-54%
googleusercontent.com	2	1,560,457	1,560,455	1,560,455	78,022,750%

You see big increases in facebook.com (+62,982%), flickr.com (+1,355%), youtube.com (584%) and googleusercontent.com (78,022,750%) in content from EOT2008 to EOT2012.

Other increases that are notable include dvidshub.net which is the domain for a site called Defense Video & Imagery Distribution System that increased by 511,514%, navy.mil (3,739%), osd.mil (1,073%), af.mil (795%).  I like to think this speaks to a desired increase in attention to .mil content in the EOT2012 project.

Another domain that stands out to me is granicus.com which I was unaware of but after a little looking turns out to be one of the big cloud service providers for the federal government (or at least it was according to the EOT2012 dataset).

.gov and .mil subdomains

The last piece I wanted to look at related to domain names was to see what sort of changes there were in the gov and mil portions of the EOT2008 and EOT2012 crawls.  This time I wanted to look at the subdomains.

I filtered my dataset a bit so that I was only looking at the .mil and .gov content.

In the EOT2008 archive there were a total of 16,072 unique subdomains and in EOT2012 there were 22,477 subdomains.  This is an increase of 40% between the two archive projects.

The EOT2008 has 5,371 subdomains unique to its holdings and EOT2012 has 11,776 unique subdomains.

Subdomains that had the most content (based on URLs downloaded) and which are only present in EOT2008 are presented below.  (Limited to the top 30)

EOT2008 Subdomain	Count
gos2.geodata.gov	809,442
boucher.house.gov	772,759
kendrickmeek.house.gov	685,368
citizensbriefingbook.change.gov	446,632
stat-usa.gov	305,936
nifl.gov	285,833
scidac-new.ca.sandia.gov	247,451
tradestatsexpress.gov	243,729
hpcf.nersc.gov	221,626
gopher.info.usaid.gov	219,051
novel.nifl.gov	218,962
dli2.nsf.gov	206,932
contractorsupport.acf.hhs.gov	188,841
pnwin.nbii.gov	188,591
faq.acf.hhs.gov	184,212
ccdf.acf.hhs.gov	182,606
arnet.gov	174,018
regulations.acf.hhs.gov	171,762
acqnet.gov	171,493
dccourts.gov	161,289
employers.acf.hhs.gov	139,141
search.info.usaid.gov	137,816
web-services.gov	137,202
earth2.epa.gov	136,441
cjtf7.army.mil	134,507
ncweb-north.wr.usgs.gov	134,486
opre.acf.hhs.gov	133,689
childsupportenforcement.acf.hhs.gov	132,023
modis-250m.nascom.nasa.gov	128,810
casd.uscourts.gov	124,146

Here is the same sort of data for the EOT2012 dataset

EOT2012 Subdomain	Count
militaryonesource.mil	698,035
uscodebeta.house.gov	387,080
democrats.foreignaffairs.house.gov	312,270
gulflink.fhpr.osd.mil	262,246
coons.senate.gov	257,721
democrats.energycommerce.house.gov	243,341
consumerfinance.gov	225,815
dcmo.defense.gov	217,255
nrd.gov	187,267
wh.gov	179,103
usaxs.xray.aps.anl.gov	178,298
democrats.budget.house.gov	175,109
democrats.edworkforce.house.gov	162,077
apps.militaryonesource.mil	157,144
naturalresources.house.gov	155,918
purl.fdlp.gov	154,718
media.dma.mil	137,581
algreen.house.gov	131,388
democrats.transportation.house.gov	129,345
democrats.naturalresources.house.gov	124,808
hanabusa.house.gov	123,794
pitts.house.gov	122,402
visclosky.house.gov	122,223
garamendi.house.gov	114,221
vault.fbi.gov	113,873
green.house.gov	113,040
sewell.house.gov	112,973
levin.house.gov	111,971
eia.gov	111,889
hahn.house.gov	111,024

This last table is a little long,  but I found the data pretty interesting to look at.   The table below shows the biggest change for domains and subdomains that were shared between the EOT2008 and EOT2012 archives. I’ve included the top forty entries for that list.

Subdomain/Domain	EOT2008	EOT2012	Change	Absolute Change	% Change
listserv.access.gpo.gov	2,217,565	7,487	-2,210,078	2,210,078	-100%
carter.house.gov	1,898,462	29,680	-1,868,782	1,868,782	-98%
catalog.gpo.gov	1,868,504	34,040	-1,834,464	1,834,464	-98%
loc.gov	63,534	1,875,264	1,811,730	1,811,730	2,852%
gpo.gov	52,427	1,796,925	1,744,498	1,744,498	3,327%
bensguide.gpo.gov	90,280	1,790,017	1,699,737	1,699,737	1,883%
edocket.access.gpo.gov	1,644,578	7,822	-1,636,756	1,636,756	-100%
nws.noaa.gov	103,367	1,676,264	1,572,897	1,572,897	1,522%
navair.navy.mil	220	1,556,320	1,556,100	1,556,100	707,318%
congress.gov	1,525,467	356	-1,525,111	1,525,111	-100%
cha.house.gov	1,366,520	109,192	-1,257,328	1,257,328	-92%
usbg.gov	1,026,360	6,724	-1,019,636	1,019,636	-99%
dol.gov	1,052,335	41,909	-1,010,426	1,010,426	-96%
resourcescommittee.house.gov	1,008,655	335	-1,008,320	1,008,320	-100%
calvert.house.gov	20,530	1,014,416	993,886	993,886	4,841%
fdlp.gov	989,415	1,554	-987,861	987,861	-100%
lcweb2.loc.gov	466,623	1,451,708	985,085	985,085	211%
cramer.house.gov	1,011,872	60,879	-950,993	950,993	-94%
ed.gov	1,141,069	241,165	-899,904	899,904	-79%
vaccines.mil	5,638	856,113	850,475	850,475	15,085%
clinicaltrials.gov	919,362	193,158	-726,204	726,204	-79%
army.mil	4,831	725,934	721,103	721,103	14,927%
boehner.house.gov	7,472	695,625	688,153	688,153	9,210%
nces.ed.gov	702,644	31,922	-670,722	670,722	-95%
prc.gov	739,849	75,682	-664,167	664,167	-90%
navy.mil	1,481	654,254	652,773	652,773	44,077%
house.gov	818,095	172,066	-646,029	646,029	-79%
fueleconomy.gov	675,522	79,943	-595,579	595,579	-88%
fema.gov	636,005	53,321	-582,684	582,684	-92%
frwebgate.access.gpo.gov	621,361	55,097	-566,264	566,264	-91%
siadapp.dmdc.osd.mil	43	559,076	559,033	559,033	1,300,077%
fdsys.gpo.gov	548,618	28	-548,590	548,590	-100%
tiger.census.gov	549,046	750	-548,296	548,296	-100%
rs6.loc.gov	550,489	6,695	-543,794	543,794	-99%
bennelson.senate.gov	16,203	553,698	537,495	537,495	3,317%
crapo.senate.gov	28,569	540,928	512,359	512,359	1,793%
eia.doe.gov	508,675	1,629	-507,046	507,046	-100%
epa.gov	623,457	117,794	-505,663	505,663	-81%
defenselink.mil	502,006	1,866	-500,140	500,140	-100%
access.gpo.gov	472,373	3,110	-469,263	469,263	-99%

I find this table interesting for a number of reasons.  First you see quite a bit more decline that I have seen in my other tables like this.  In fact 26 of the 40 subdomains/domains (54%) on this list decreased from EOT2008 to EOT2012.

In looking at the list as well I can see some of the sites that I can see the transition of some of the sites within GPO, for example access.gpo.gov going down 90% in captured content, fdsys.gpo.gov going down by 94%, bensguide.gpo.gov increasing by 1,883%.

Wrapping Up

I like to think that it helps to justify some of the work that the partners of the End of Term project are committing to the project when you see that there are large numbers of domains and subdomains that existed in 2008 but that weren’t crawled again in 2012 (and we can only assume they weren’t around in 2012).

There are a few more things I want to look at in this work so stay tuned.

If you have questions or comments about this post,  please let me know via Twitter.

This post carries on from where the previous post in this series ended.

A very quick recap,  this series is trying to better understand the EOT2008 and the EOT2012 web archives.  The goal is to see how they are similar, how they are different, and if there is anything that can be learned that will help us with the upcoming EOT2016 project.

What

The CDX files we are using has a column that contains the Media Type (MIME Type) for the different URIs in the WARC files.  A list of the assigned Media Types are available at the International Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) in their Media Type Registry.

This is a field that is inherently “dirty” for a few reasons.  This field is populated from a field in the WARC Record that comes directly from the web server that responded to the initial request.  Usually these are fairly accurate but there are many times where they are either wrong or at the least confusing.  Often times this is caused by  a server administrator, programmer, or system architect that is trying to be clever,  or just misconfigured something.

I looked at the Media Types for the two EOT collections to see if there are any major differences between what we collected in the two EOT archives.

In the EOT2008 archive there are a total of 831 unique Mime/Media Types,  in the EOT2012 there are a total of 1,208 unique type values.

I took the top 20 Mime/Media Types for each of the archives and pushed them together to see if there was any noticeable change in what we captured between the two archives.  In addition to just the raw counts I also looked at what percentage of the archive a given Media Type represented.  Finally I noted the overall change in those two percentages.

Media Type	2008 Count	% of Archive	2012 Count	% of Archive	% Change	Change in % of Archive
text/html	105,592,852	65.9%	116,238,952	59.9%	10.1%	-6.0%
image/jpeg	13,667,545	8.5%	24,339,398	12.5%	78.1%	4.0%
image/gif	13,033,116	8.1%	8,408,906	4.3%	-35.5%	-3.8%
application/pdf	10,281,663	6.4%	7,097,717	3.7%	-31.0%	-2.8%
–	4,494,674	2.8%	613,187	0.3%	-86.4%	-2.5%
text/plain	3,907,202	2.4%	3,899,652	2.0%	-0.2%	-0.4%
image/png	2,067,480	1.3%	7,356,407	3.8%	255.8%	2.5%
text/css	841,105	0.5%	1,973,508	1.0%	134.6%	0.5%

Because I like pictures here is a chart of the percent change.

If we compare the Media Types between the two archives we find that the two archives share 527 Media Types.  The EOT2008 archive has 304 Media Types that aren’t present in EOT2012 and EOT2012 has 681 Media Types that aren’t present in EOT2008.

The ten most frequent Media Types by count found only in the EOT2008 archive are presented below.

Media Type	Count
no-type	405,188
text/x-vcal	17,368
.wk1	8,761
x-text/tabular	5,312
application/x-wp	5,158
*	4,318
x-application/pdf	3,660
application/x-gunzip	3,374
image/x-fits	3,340
WINDOWS-1252	2,304

The ten most frequent Media Types by count found only in the EOT2012 archive are presented below.

Media Type	Count
warc/revisit	12,190,512
application/http	1,050,895
application/x-mpegURL	23,793
img/jpeg	10,466
audio/x-flac	7,251
application/x-font-ttf	7,015
application/x-font-woff	6,852
application/docx	3,473
font/ttf	3,323
application/calendar	2,419

In the EOT2012 archive the team that captured content had fully moved to the WARC format for storing Web archive content.  The warc/revisit records are records for URLs that had not changed content-wise across more than one crawl.  Instead of storing the URL again, there is a reference to the previously captured content in the warc/revisit record.  That’s why there are so many of these Media types.

Below is a table showing the thirty most changed Media Types that are present in both the EOT2008 and EOT2012 archives.  You can see both the change in overall numbers as well as the percentage change between the two archives.

Media Type	EOT2008	EOT2012	Change	% Change
image/jpeg	13,667,545	24,339,398	10,671,853	78.1%
text/html	105,592,852	116,238,952	10,646,100	10.1%
image/png	2,067,480	7,356,407	5,288,927	255.8%
image/gif	13,033,116	8,408,906	-4,624,210	-35.5%
–	4,494,674	613,187	-3,881,487	-86.4%
application/pdf	10,281,663	7,097,717	-3,183,946	-31.0%
application/javascript	39,019	1,511,594	1,472,575	3774.0%
text/css	841,105	1,973,508	1,132,403	134.6%
text/xml	344,748	1,433,159	1,088,411	315.7%
unk	4,326	818,619	814,293	18823.2%
application/rss+xml	64,280	731,253	666,973	1037.6%
application/x-javascript	622,958	1,232,306	609,348	97.8%
application/vnd.ms-excel	734,077	212,605	-521,472	-71.0%
text/javascript	69,340	481,701	412,361	594.7%
video/x-ms-asf	26,978	372,565	345,587	1281.0%
application/msword	563,161	236,716	-326,445	-58.0%
application/x-shockwave-flash	192,018	479,011	286,993	149.5%
application/octet-stream	419,187	191,421	-227,766	-54.3%
application/zip	312,872	92,318	-220,554	-70.5%
application/json	1,268	217,742	216,474	17072.1%
video/x-flv	1,448	180,222	178,774	12346.3%
image/jpg	26,421	172,863	146,442	554.3%
application/postscript	181,795	39,832	-141,963	-78.1%
image/x-icon	45,294	164,673	119,379	263.6%
chemical/x-mopac-input	110,324	1,035	-109,289	-99.1%
application/atom+xml	165,821	269,219	103,398	62.4%
application/xml	145,141	246,857	101,716	70.1%
application/x-cgi	100,813	51	-100,762	-99.9%
audio/mpeg	95,613	179,045	83,432	87.3%
video/mp4	1,887	73,475	71,588	3793.7%

Presented as a set of graphs,  first showing the change in number of instances of a given Media Type between the two archives.

The second graph is the percentage change between the two archives.

Things that stand out are the growth of application/javascript between 2008 and 2012,  up 3,774% and application/json that was up over 17,000%.  Two formats used to deliver video grew as well with video/x-flv and video/mp4 increasing 12,346% and 3794% respectively.

There were a number of Media Types that reduced in the number and percentage but they are not as dramatic as those identified above.  Of note is that between 2008 and 2012 there was a decline of 100% in content with a Media Type of application/x-cgi and a 78% decrease in files that were application/postscript.

Working with the Media Types found in large web archives is a bit messy.  While there are standard ways of presenting Media Types to browsers, there are also non-standard, experimental and inaccurate instances of Media Types that will exist in these archives.  It does appear that we can see the introduction of some of the newer technologies between the two different archives.  Technologies such as the adoption of JSON and Javascript based sites as well as new formats of video on the web.

If you have questions or comments about this post,  please let me know via Twitter.

In 2008 a group of institution comprised of the Internet Archive, Library of Congress, California Digital Library, University of North Texas, and Government Publishing Office worked together to collect the web presence of the federal government in a project that has come to be known as the End of Term Presidential Harvest 2008.

Working together this group established the scope of the project, developed a tool to collect nominations of URLs important to the community for harvesting, carried out a harvest of the federal web presence before the election, after the election, and after the inauguration of President Obama. This collection was harvested by the Internet Archive, Library of Congress, California Digital Library, and the UNT Libraries.  At the end of the EOT project the data harvested was shared between the partners with several institutions acquiring a copy of the complete EOT dataset for their local collections.

Moving forward four years the same group got together to organize the harvesting of the federal domain in 2012.  While originally scoped as a way of capturing the transition of the executive branch,  this EOT project also served as a way to systematically capture a large portion of the federal web on a four year calendar.  In addition to the 2008 partners,  Harvard joined in the project for 2012.

Again the team worked to identify in-scope content to collect, this time however the content included URLs from the social web including Twitter and Facebook for agencies, offices and individuals in the federal government.  Because there was not a change in office because of the 2012 election, there was just a set of crawls that occurred during the fall of 2012 and the winter of 2013.  Again this content was shared between the project partners interested in acquiring the archives for their own collections.

The End of Term group is a loosely organized group that comes together ever four years to conduct the harvesting of the federal web presence. As we ramp up for the end of the Obama administration the group has started to plan the EOT 2016 project with a goal to start crawling in September of 2016.  This time there will be a new president so the crawling will probably take the format of the 2008 crawls with a pre-election, post-election and post-inauguration set of crawls.

So far there hasn’t been much in the way of analysis to compare the EOT2008 and EOT2012 web archives.  There are a number of questions that have come up over the years that remain unanswered about the two collections.  This series of posts will hopefully take a stab at answering some of those questions and maybe provide better insight into the makeup of these two collections.  Finally there are hopefully a few things that can be learned from the different approaches used during the creation of these archives that might be helpful as we begin the EOT 2016 crawling.

Working with the EOT Data

The dataset that I am working with for these posts consists of the CDX files created for the EOT2008 and EOT2012 archive.  Each of the CDX files acts as an index to the raw archived content and contains a number of fields that can be useful for analysis.  All of the archive content is referenced in the CDX file.

If you haven’t looked at a CDX file in the past here is an example of a CDX file.

gov,loc)/jukebox/search/results?count=20&fq[0]=take_vocal_id:farrar,%20geraldine&fq[1]=take_vocal_id:martinelli,%20giovanni&page=1&q=geraldine%20farrar&referrer=/jukebox/ 20121125005312 http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/search/results?count=20&fq%5B0%5D=take_vocal_id%3AFarrar%2C+Geraldine&fq%5B1%5D=take_vocal_id%3AMartinelli%2C+Giovanni&page=1&q=geraldine+farrar&referrer=%2Fjukebox%2F text/html 200 LFN2AKE4D46XEZNOP3OLXG2WAPLEKZKO - - - 533010532 LOC-EOT2012-001-20121125003355718-04184-15895~wbgrp-crawl012.us.archive.org~8443.warc.gz
gov,loc)/jukebox/search/results?count=20&fq[0]=take_vocal_id:farrar,%20geraldine&fq[1]=take_vocal_id:schumann-heink,%20ernestine&page=1&q=geraldine%20farrar&referrer=/jukebox/ 20121125005219 http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/search/results?count=20&fq%5B0%5D=take_vocal_id%3AFarrar%2C+Geraldine&fq%5B1%5D=take_vocal_id%3ASchumann-Heink%2C+Ernestine&page=1&q=geraldine+farrar&referrer=%2Fjukebox%2F text/html 200 EL5OT5NAXGGV6VADBLNP2CBZSZ5MH6OT - - - 531160983 LOC-EOT2012-001-20121125003355718-04184-15895~wbgrp-crawl012.us.archive.org~8443.warc.gz
gov,loc)/jukebox/search/results?count=20&fq[0]=take_vocal_id:farrar,%20geraldine&fq[1]=take_vocal_id:scotti,%20antonio&page=1&q=geraldine%20farrar&referrer=/jukebox/ 20121125005255 http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/search/results?count=20&fq%5B0%5D=take_vocal_id%3AFarrar%2C+Geraldine&fq%5B1%5D=take_vocal_id%3AScotti%2C+Antonio&page=1&q=geraldine+farrar&referrer=%2Fjukebox%2F text/html 200 SEFDA5UNFREPA35QNNLI7DPNU3P4WDCO - - - 804325022 LOC-EOT2012-001-20121125003257404-04183-15895~wbgrp-crawl012.us.archive.org~8443.warc.gz
gov,loc)/jukebox/search/results?count=20&fq[0]=take_vocal_id:farrar,%20geraldine&fq[1]=take_vocal_id:viafora,%20gina&page=1&q=geraldine%20farrar&referrer=/jukebox/ 20121125005309 http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/search/results?count=20&fq%5B0%5D=take_vocal_id%3AFarrar%2C+Geraldine&fq%5B1%5D=take_vocal_id%3AViafora%2C+Gina&page=1&q=geraldine+farrar&referrer=%2Fjukebox%2F text/html 200 EV6N3TMKIVWAHEHF54M2EMWVM5DP7REJ - - - 532966964 LOC-EOT2012-001-20121125003355718-04184-15895~wbgrp-crawl012.us.archive.org~8443.warc.gz
gov,loc)/jukebox/search/results?count=20&fq[0]=take_vocal_id:homer,%20louise&fq[1]=take_composer_name:campana,%20f.%20&page=1&q=geraldine%20farrar&referrer=/jukebox/ 20121125070122 http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/search/results?count=20&fq%5B0%5D=take_vocal_id%3AHomer%2C+Louise&fq%5B1%5D=take_composer_name%3ACampana%2C+F.+&page=1&q=geraldine+farrar&referrer=%2Fjukebox%2F text/html 200 FW2IGVNKIQGBUQILQGZFLXNEHL634OI6 - - - 661008391 LOC-EOT2012-001-20121125064213479-04227-15895~wbgrp-crawl012.us.archive.org~8443.warc.gz

The CDX format is a space delimited file with the following fields

• SURT formatted URI
• Capture Time
• Original URI
• MIME Type
• Response Code
• Content Hash (SHA1)
• Redirect URL
• Meta tags (not populated)
• Compressed length (sometimes populated)
• Offset in WARC file
• WARC File Name

The tools I’m working with to analyze the EOT datasets will consist of Python scripts that either extract specific data from the CDX files where it can be further sorted and counted, or they will be scripts that work on these sorted and counted versions of files.

I’m trying to post code and derived datasets in a Github repository called eot-cdx-analysis if you are interested in taking a look.  There is also a link to the original CDX datasets there as well.

How much

The EOT2008 dataset consists of 160,212,141 URIs and the EOT2012 dataset comes in at 194,066,940 URIs.  Unfortunately the CDX files that we are working with don’t have consistent size information that we can use for analysis but the rough sizes for each of the archives is EOT2008 at 16TB and EOT2012 at just over 41.6TB.

When

The first dimension I wanted to look at was when was the content harvested for each of the EOT rounds.  In both cases we all remember starting the harvesting “sometime in September” and then ending the crawls “sometime in March” of the following year.  How close were we to our memory?

For this I extracted the Capture Time field from the CDX file, converted that into a date yyyy–mm-dd was a decent bucket to group into and then sorted and counted each instance of a date.

This first chart shows the harvest dates contained in the EOT2008 CDX files.  Things got kicked off in September 2008 and apparently concluded all the way in OCT 2009.  There is another blip of activity in May of 2009.  This is probably something to go back and look at to help remember what exactly these two sets of crawling were that happened after March 2009 when we all seem to remember crawling stopping.

The EOT2012 crawling started off in mid-September and this time finished up in the first part of March 2013.  There is a more consistent shape to the crawling for this EOT with a pretty consistent set of crawling happening between mid-October and the end of January.

When you overlay the two charts you can see how the two compare.  Obviously the EOT2008 data continues quite a bit further than the EOT2012 but where they overlap you can see that there were different patterns to the collecting.

Closing

This is the first of a few posts related to web archiving and specifically to comparing the EOT2008 and EOT2012 archives.  We are approaching the time to start the EOT2016 crawls and it would be helpful to have more information about what we crawled in the two previous cycles.

In addition to just needing to do this work there will be a presentation on some of these findings as well as other types of analysis at the 2016 Web Archiving and Digital Libraries (WADL) workshop that is happening at the end of JCDL2016 this year in Newark, NJ.

If there are questions you have about the EOT2008 or EOT2012 archives please get in contact with me and we can see if we can answer them.

If you have questions or comments about this post,  please let me know via Twitter.