Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

In this blog post, we detail three short tests in which we challenge the Google crawler's ability to index JavaScript-dependent representations. After an introduction to the problem space, we describe our three tests as introduced below. String and DOM modification : we modify a string and insert it into the DOM. Without the ability to execute JavaScript on the client, the string will not be indexed by the Google crawler. Anchor Tag Translation : we decode an encoded URI and add it to the DOM using JavaScript. The Google crawler should index the decoded URI after discovering it from the JavaScript-dependent representation. Redirection via JavaScript : we use JavaScript to build a URI and redirect the browser to the newly built URI. The Google crawler should be able to index the resource to which JavaScript redirects. Introduction JavaScript continues to create challenges for web crawlers run by web archives and search engines. To summarize the problem, our web brows...

I attended the 2013 Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) Conference on September 22-26 in Valletta, Malta .  Although I've had papers at several of the prior TPDL (known as ECDL prior to 2011) conferences , I think this is the first one I've personally attended since ECDL 2005 in Austria.  Normally I prefer to send students to present their papers, but this year we had five full papers accepted, so I could not afford to send all the students and I went in their stead.  An unfortunate side effect of having so many papers is that between preparation and my own presentations I was unable to see as much of the conference as I would have liked. The conference began with Herbert Van de Sompel and I giving a tutorial about ResourceSync .  Attendees registered for all tutorials and were free to attend whichever one they preferred.  We had as many as ten people in ours at one point, but more importantly we had some key people present who will be imple...