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...

Figure 1: The Browsertrix Tool Suite For the Saving Ads project and the Game Walkthroughs and Web Archiving project , we have used Browsertrix Crawler , ArchiveWeb.page , and ReplayWeb.page , which are Webrecorder tools that were discussed in Walsh et al.’s paper “ High Fidelity Web Archiving of News Sites and New Media with Browsertrix .” In this paper, Walsh et al. describe tools that are integrated with Browsertrix and the features that differentiated their tools from other web archive crawlers and replay systems. Browsertrix is a free and open-source web archiving platform that can be run locally , self-hosted , or used through Webrecorder's hosted service . Browsertrix uses Browsertrix Crawler for archiving web pages, ArchiveWeb.page to patch archived web pages, and ReplayWeb.page to replay archived web pages (Figure 1). Walsh, Tessa, Henry Wilkinson, and Ilya Kreymer. “High Fidelity Web Archiving of News Sites and New Media with Browsertrix.” in Proceedings of the 2024 Int...

Figure 1: Example of an image pair from Reyes Ayala’s dataset of a live web page (left screenshot) and an archived web page (right screenshot) . For the Game Walkthroughs and Web Archiving project , we have created web archiving livestreams ( example livestream ) that use tools to measure the performance of a web archive crawler during the livestream. In a previous blog post , I compared six different approaches for measuring web archiving and replay performance metrics so that I could identify tools that could be used during our future web archiving livestreams. In this post, I will summarize another related work (“ Towards a better QA process: Automatic detection of quality problems in archived websites using visual comparisons ”) by Brenda Reyes Ayala that determines the quality of an archived web page by comparing screenshots of the live web page and archived web page.   Reyes Ayala, B. (2025). Towards a better QA process: Automatic detection of quality problems in archived we...