A method for measuring the evolution of a topic on the Web: the case of “Informetrics”

Abstract

The World Wide Web is growing at an enormous speed, and has become an indispensable source for information and research. New pages are being added to the Web, but there are additional processes as well: pages are moved or removed and/or their content changes. In order to obtain a better understanding of these processes, we developed a method for tracking topics on the Web for long periods of time. We use multiple data collection methods that allow us: to discover new pages related to the topic; to identify changes to existing pages and to detect previously existing pages that have been removed or their content is not relevant anymore to the specified topic. The method is demonstrated through monitoring Web pages that contain the term “informetrics” for a period of eight years. The data collection method also allowed us to analyze the dynamic changes in search engine coverage; here we illustrate these changes on Google, the search engine used for the longest period of time for data collection in this project.