🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses a key limitation in traditional web crawling analysis, which typically assumes URLs are uniformly distributed and thereby overlooks the heterogeneous “persistent core–dynamic periphery” structure inherent in real-world web graphs. To overcome this assumption, the authors propose a novel two-component urn model grounded in discovery curves and sliding windows, enabling the first quantitative estimation of both the core proportion and the dynamic evolution parameters of the periphery within a web corpus. By jointly fitting coverage and survival rates, the model demonstrates strong empirical validity on both Common Crawl and German academic web datasets. Results reveal a pronounced core–periphery organization in both collections, with further heterogeneity observed even within the dynamic periphery itself.
📝 Abstract
A longitudinal web crawl is a sequence of partial samples of an evolving URL population. Pairwise containment between two crawls is the standard probe; under a simple \emph{urn} model of the crawl -- each round samples a fraction of the URLs and replaces a fraction -- it recovers two interpretable rates, per-round survival $α$ and coverage $c$, but treats the population as uniform and consumes one pair at a time. In this work, we define a formal language for talking about a crawl. We extend this analysis with the \emph{discovery curve} $U(s, T)$, the cumulative URL footprint over a sliding window of $T$ crawls starting at $s$, which under the same urn model is also a closed-form function of $(α, c)$. Containment and the discovery curve are then two projections of one process: independent fits agree on $(α, c)$ when the urn is homogeneous, so any disagreement is itself a measurement. Applied to Common Crawl (2020--2025, domain granularity) and to the German Academic Web (GAW, URL granularity), the two projections disagree on both archives, and a two-component urn with a persistent core fraction $κ$ alongside shell parameters $(α_\partial, c_\partial)$ reconciles the disagreement. A residual on $c_\partial$ remains, signaling that the shell itself is not homogeneous; $κ$ is recorded as the scalar entry point to a rank-resolved generalization, which is left to follow-up work. \keywords{web archive \and crawl coverage \and discovery curve \and urn model \and two-component model \and URL lifetime}