Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

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...

Image Generated by DALL-E The utility of Large Language Models (LLMs) across diverse tasks raises important questions about the role of AI in web archive contexts, particularly in facilitating change analysis tasks. For instance, can LLMs effectively detect and analyze changes in webpages? How can this be achieved? What advantages and limitations do AI approaches have compared to traditional methods?.  In this blog post, I summarize our paper  “Exploring Large Language Models for Analyzing Changes in Web Archive Content: A Retrieval-Augmented Generation Approach”  ( Jhon G. Botello ,  Lesley Frew ,  Jose J. Padilla ,  Michele C. Weigle ) published at the  9th Computational Archival Science (CAS) Workshop 2024  (check Lesley Frew's trip report for more details about the workshop). The paper represents our first step in determining the ability of LLMs and the extent to which they can assist with change analysis tasks. Motivation As we interact...

Figure 1: Mixed language blocks on a memento of a Twitter timeline. Highlighted with blue colored box for Portuguese, orange for English, and red for Urdu. Dotted border indicates the template present in the original HTML response while blocks with solid borders indicate lazily loaded content. Would you be surprised if I were to tell you that Twitter is a multi-lingual website, supporting 47 different international languages ? How about if I were to tell you that a usual Twitter timeline page can contain tweets in whatever languages the owner of the handle chooses to tweet, but can also show navigation bar and various sidebar blocks in many different languages simultaneously, now surprised? Well, while it makes no sense, it may actually happen in web archives when a memento of a timeline is accessed as shown in Figure 1. Spoiler alert! Cookies are to be blamed, once again . Last month, I was investigating a real life version of " Ron Burgundy will read anything on the...