Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

  Figure 1: Web archiving process augmented with FidEx. Figure from https://www.usenix.org/system/files/nsdi26-zhu-jingyuan.pdf . To improve the annotation feature for our web archiving livestreams , I have been looking at different Quality Assurance tools that detect replay problems and explain why specific resources fail to load. Most of the Quality Assurance tools that determine the quality of the archived web page do not specify the reason why each web resource failed to load. Zhu et al.’s FidEx tool and Archive-It's Wayback QA tool try to assist with this problem. Zhu, Sun, and Madhyastha’s paper " Detecting and Diagnosing Errors in Serving Archived Web Pages " describes their approach (Figure 1) for detecting problems with replay quality that are caused by rewriting errors made by the replay system. Their approach involves comparing the layout trees ( HTML DOM [Document Object Model] and CSSOM [CSS Object Model]) and the JavaScript writes for the live and archi...

URL Arguments in API Calls Can Cause Intermittent Temporal Violations While Replaying Archived Web Pages  Michael L. Nelson 2026-05-26 Just over two months ago, I was at the ​ Information Stewardship Forum 2026 at the Internet Archive, where I was fortunate enough to present a lightning talk about making copies of copies, entitled " The Disintegration Loops: Generational Loss in Web Archives ".  During one of the breaks, Mark Graham asked Sawood Alam to take a look at a problem that had stumped the Wayback Machine support team.  I was sitting next to Sawood, and knowing my love for web archiving investigations, Mark invited me to take a look too.  The original inquiry: Hi, everyone! Got a concerning report from a patron alleging that WBM "URLs were intermittently displaying the current version of the website instead of the archived version." The URLs in question are: https://web.archive.org/web/20240222221058/https://www.victoriassecret.com/us/site-terms...

Figure 1: Jawa Overview. Figure from https://www.usenix.org/system/files/osdi22-goel.pdf While working on the Saving Ads project , we identified problems with replaying ads (technical report: “ Archiving and Replaying Current Web Advertisements: Challenges and Opportunities ”) that used JavaScript code to dynamically generate URLs. These URLs included random values that differed during crawl time and replay time, resulting  in failed requests upon replay. Figure 2 shows an example ad iframe URL that failed to replay, because a dynamically generated random value was used in the subdomain. URL matching approaches like fuzzy matching could resolve these problems by matching the dynamically generated URL with the URL that was crawled. Figure 2: Different SafeFrame URLs during crawl and replay sessions. Google’s pubads_impl.js ( WACZ | URI-R: https://securepubads.g.doubleclick.net/pagead/managed/js/gpt/m202308210101/pubads_impl.js?cb=31077272 ) generates the random SafeFrame URL. Goe...