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user interface

Analysis of the Arquivo.pt query dataset

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Last updated on December 10th, 2024 at 03:12 pm

Arquivo.pt query logs are unique resources for research

Arquivo.pt provides a “Google-like” service that enables searching pages and images collected from the web since the 1990s. Notice that Arquivo.pt search complements live-web search engines because it enables temporal search over information that is no longer available online on its original websites.

Analyzing user behavior is an important research topic to understand users’ information needs and enhance the quality of search results. Thus, when a user interacts with a search engine, the system records the user’s actions in a file called the query log. Query logs from web archives are unique resources for research because they describe the real needs of web-archive users about the historical information published online over time.

Research case study

Flavie Gallois and Adam Jatowt from the University of Innsbruck, and Ricardo Campos from the University of Beira Interior and INESC TEC analyzed user search behavior based on the Arquivo.pt search query log dataset collected over a period of 3 months from June to September 2021 (Analyzing User Search Behaviour in Temporal Web Repositories through Search Query Log Analysis).

This study analyzed query features such as length, type or frequency and compared the obtained results with previous work about user search behavior over web-archives and live-web search engines.

This study revealed interesting trends and patterns about how users search for information within web archives, with strong potential for future research work.

How do web-archive users search?

Figure 1 : Distribution of country origin of users
Figure 1 : Distribution of country origin of users
Figure 2: Distribution of languages used in queries
Figure 2: Distribution of languages used in queries

The users came from Portugal in 85.7% of the queries. However, the Portuguese language was identified through automatic language identification of queries as being used in only 37% of the queries. This suggests that users apply other languages than their own to search in web archives.

Users of Arquivo.pt tend to use longer queries with more words and characters in comparison to previous studies, both over web archives and live-web search engines. About 92% of the queries had 5 or fewer terms (average of 25 characters), with 3 being the most common number of submitted terms. In previous work about search behavior in web archives, it was observed that users tended to submit from 1 to 3 terms per query, with 1 term as the most common submission.

Users tend to issue multiple queries within a session instead of a single query, possibly indicating a need for refining their search queries or exploring multiple options for inquiry.

87,7% of the queries submitted to Arquivo.pt used Desktop Browsers, despite Arquivo.pt providing mobile-friendly user interfaces. Old web-archived pages are not responsive and render poorly on mobile devices. Thus, it is expectable that users mostly use web archives through their desktops.

Figure 3: Arquivo.pt users can refine the time span of their queries by using the From and To datepickers.
Figure 3: Arquivo.pt users can refine the time span of their queries by using the From and To datepickers.

Users refined the time span of the search (using the datepickers) in about 50% of queries which indicates awareness of temporal needs peculiar to web-archive usage. Interestingly, users modified the From datepicker more frequently than the To datepicker. Notice that keeping the default time span may fit the user information needs and does not necessarily indicate the lack of awareness about the existence of the function to define time span (peculiar to web-archive search).

Only a small percentage of users included specific years in their query terms (4%), potentially suggesting that in these cases the time span function was insufficient, or unnoticed by some users.

The obtained results suggest that users are more conscious of their information needs and have improved their search techniques to be more effective over web-archives instead of just using them out of curiosity as first-comers.

What is searched in a web-archive?

The authors of the study applied automatic named entity recognition over the user queries and derived a set of word clouds that graphically provide a glimpse of the most common information needs of Arquivo.pt users:

Figure 4: Word cloud of the most frequent query terms submitted to Arquivo.pt.
Figure 4: Word cloud of the most frequent query terms submitted to Arquivo.pt.
Figure 6: The most frequent Geographical Locations in query terms submitted to Arquivo.pt.
Figure 6: The most frequent Geographical Locations in query terms submitted to Arquivo.pt.
Figure 6: The most frequent Organizations in query terms submitted to Arquivo.pt
Figure 6: The most frequent Organizations in query terms submitted to Arquivo.pt
Figure 7: The most frequent Persons in query terms submitted to Arquivo.pt.
Figure 7: The most frequent Persons in query terms submitted to Arquivo.pt.

Access to research Arquivo.pt query dataset

Arquivo.pt released a set of resources to support research studies over its

Query log dataset

Original log files (samples)

Documentation

Evaluation Metrics for web-archive search

The first step to understand user behavior is to define evaluation metrics. Defining metrics is a powerful tool to set long and short-term goals to decide which new products and features should be released to the users.

We share a work-in-progress report which aggregates information about Web Archive Search Evaluation Metrics. This contributes to comparing users’ search behavior between live-web and web-archive search engines. Feel free to comment directly on the collaborative document or to contact us.

This report also provides a summary of references about previous work, query workflows and structure of the corresponding query logs produced by Arquivo.pt, to facilitate the work from the researchers to study these data sets.

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Completing webpages from the past: it is possible!

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Last updated on October 16th, 2023 at 06:59 pm

Some web-archived pages are reproduced incompletely due to problems occurred during the archiving process (e.g. deformatted or missing embedded images).

Complete page is a function of Arquivo.pt that allows to recover missing elements in web-archived pages, from other web archives or the original websites.

When a user views a page archived in Arquivo.pt, just needs to access the Options menu in the top right corner and choose Complete page.

This process is performed automatically.

How does Complete page work?

If you open a web-archived page that appears incomplete, try the Complete page option and wait.

Arquivo.pt will search for missing elements on the Internet and in other web archives using the Memento protocol. If it succeeds, the obtained elements will be immediately displayed on the web-archived page.

Later, these recovered elements are integrated into the Arquivo.pt collection, so that the web-archived page will appear more complete in the future accesses performed by any user.

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Completing the home page of artist Cristina Guerra’s website found a missing image.

For example, the website of artist Cristina Guerra archived in 2005 had a missing image. By using Complete page, it was possible in 2021 to obtain this missing image from another web archive which preserved it.

Participate in collaborative curation to improve the quality of Arquivo.pt!

Due to the high number of web-archived pages, it is not possible for Arquivo.pt to complete them all automatically. Therefore, the collaboration of users to identify important pages with missing elements and try to complete them is important.

By using Complete page, the users are contributing to improve the quality of the historical webpages preserved in Arquivo.pt!

Always give it a try to complete web-archived pages may that look incomplete. If you detect any problem, contact us.

Spread the word about the Arquivo.pt Complete page!

Arquivo.pt at Jornadas de Computação Científica 2023. Register now!

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Last updated on October 24th, 2023 at 04:03 pm

Jornadas de Computação Científica 2023 was held at the Naval School in Almada from 27 to 29 June 2023.

This event is a meeting for sharing knowledge among the entities that make up the national higher education and research community.

The event counts with the participation of decision-makers of the institutions, people in charge of computer technical services and people responsible for libraries and documentation services, among others.

Arquivo.pt presented two 90-minute sessions, on June 28th from 2h30 p.m. to 6 p.m., under the theme “Arquivo.pt services for managing citations and cybersecurity” and the service Arquivo.pt Memorial in the Zapping session.

Agenda

June 28 2:30-16 p.m.: Arquivo.pt: available services and system architecture

Sessão 2 4:30-6 p.m.: Arquivo.pt: uma ferramenta para gerir citações e cibersegurança

Arquivo.pt Memorial

Register

Jornadas de Computação Científica Registration page Científica 2023

Create automatic narratives about any topic!

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Last updated on August 5th, 2024 at 04:51 pm

Arquivo.pt provides a new function that allows you to automatically create temporal narratives on any topic.

The “Narrative” functionality, integrated into Arquivo.pt in September 2021, is the result of the collaboration between “Conta-me Histórias”, winner of the Arquivo.pt Award 2018, and Arquivo.pt.

The “Conta-me Histórias” (Tell me Stories) project was developed by researchers from the Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support (LIAAD – INESCTEC )  and affiliated to the institutions Instituto Politécnico de Tomar – Center for Research in Smart Cities (CI2) ; University of Porto and University of Innsbruck .

How it works?

When a user enters a set of words about a topic in the Arquivo.pt search box and clicks on the “Narrative” button, the user is directed to the “Conta-me Histórias” service, which automatically analyzes the news from 25 websites archived by Arquivo.pt over time and presents a chronology of news related to the topic.

For example, if we search for “Just Bieber” and click on the “Narrative” button (Figure 1), we will be directed to the “Conta-me Histórias” , where we will automatically obtain a narrative of archived news (Figure 2).

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Figure 1: Search results for pages about “Justin Bieber”.

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Figure 2: Narrative of news about “Justin Bieber” from Portuguese news sites preserved by Arquivo.pt generated by the “Conta-me Histórias” service.

Create your narrative now!

“Conta-me Histórias” researches, analyzes and aggregates thousands of results to generate each narrative about a topic. It is recommended to choose descriptive words about well-defined themes, personalities or events to obtain good narratives.

Creating a narrative is useful for researchers, journalists or citizens who want to quickly get an overview of the evolution of a topic along time, thus saving them a lot of time and effort.

Go to Arquivo.pt and try to create a narrative about a theme of your choice.

Tell us about your experience so we can improve the service!

Presentations in the IIPC Web Archiving Conference and RESAW 2021

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Thumbnail IIPC WAC 2021

Last updated on August 4th, 2024 at 06:22 pm

During the week of 14 to 18 June, three international meetings were held by videoconference with the participation of the Arquivo.pt:

    • International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) – General Assembly – general assembly of the consortium that gathers the Web archiving initiatives around the world
    • Web Archiving Conference 2021 – the most important meeting in the field of Web preservation, where experts share new knowledge and experiences
    • RESAW Conference – meeting of the European RESAW network (Research Infrastructure for the Study of Archived Web Materials) this year in its 4th edition, mainly addressed to the community of researchers from non-technological scientific areas, such as Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities.

Contributions of Arquivo.pt to the international community

Arquivo.pt presented some results of the work developed in the last year, with emphasis on the functionalities that improve the reproduction of the archived contents, such as the “Complete the page”.
Two historical collections were integrated on the Arquivo.pt: the Geocities and the Internet Memory Foundation. Arquivo.pt did special collections about the 2019 European Elections and Covid-19.
The contents of Arquivo.pt are accessible to any researcher regardless of the country they are in and therefore it is a useful service to the international community.

Presentations

  • Arquivo.pt updates 2021: presentation at the IIPC – General Assembly, by Daniel Gomes (Vídeo)
  • Complete the page. 1 minute drop in (presentation at the IIPC – General Assembly “complete the page”), by Daniel Gomes (Slide, Video)
  • A transnational and cross-lingual crawl of the European Parliamentary Elections 2019, by Ivo Branco (Slides, Vídeo)
  • Enhancing access to research the Geocities historical collection, by Pedro Gomes (Slides, Vídeo)
Complete the page - demo
Complete the page – demo. Slide used in the IIPC 1 minute presentation, at the IIPC General Assembly 2021

New “query suggestions” on Arquivo.pt!

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Arquivo.pt launched a new version, named Caronte, on January 19, 2021.

In this version we improved the query suggestions feature (Did you mean).

Whenever a user enters a query containing a potential error, Arquivo.pt presents a suggestion for an alternative query.

For example, when searching for “now york” you get the suggestion “Did you mean: new york”.

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Figure 1: Example of the query suggest feature by searching the term “now york”

The opening of applications to the Arquivo.pt Award 2021 until the 4th May became also emphasized on the home page.

Help us to improve!

To help us, just search the Arquivo.pt using any device (e.g. laptop, mobile phone, tablet).

If you encounter any problem, please contact us!

Remember to always send us the address of the page where you detected the problem.

To know more

We improved the Arquivo.pt interface (Basileus release)

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Last updated on November 17th, 2020 at 07:00 pm

Arquivo.pt launched a new version, called Basileus, on November 11, 2020.

The purpose of this version was to improve the user experience when browsing through the different interfaces of Arquivo.pt.

Adjustments were made at the level of Web design which resulted in greater consistency in the structure of the code, in the graphic aspects and in the interactions, such as colors, fonts and buttons.

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Figure 1: Search and replay interface of Web pages. In the figure, a replay of a Web page from Geocities historical collections on Arquivo.pt.

Help us to improve!

To help us, just search the Arquivo.pt using any device (e.g. laptop, mobile phone, tablet).

If you encounter any problems, please contact us!

Remember to always send the address of the page where you detected the problem.

To know more

Arquivo.pt goes mobile!

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página inicial do Arquivo.pt - versão mobile

On November 28 2017, Arquivo.pt launched a new version named Afrodite.

The main novelty is the adaptation of user interfaces to mobile devices.

On the other hand, it also enables access to the mobile versions of the preserved sites.

Arquivo.pt began to preserve the mobile web too!

Mobile version of the homepage of Arquivo.pt.

It is now easier to use Arquivo.pt everywhere

Using your mobile phone, try searching for all of the versions that Arquivo.pt preserved from the website of the organization where you worked or studied.

List of preserved versions of a site.

Mobile version of textual search.

Mobile versions of preserved sites can also be accessed.

And more…

Improvements were also made to the desktop user interfaces, including a new responsive footer and a new language selection bar.

The alpha version of a new API was also published to improve the automatic access to the information preserved by Arquivo.pt.

To know more, see the technical details of the new version of Arquivo.pt.

It is very important that you help us to testing this new version!

There are numerous models of mobile devices and we cannot test them all.

We would appreciate if could you spent 1 minute testing this new version using your phone or tablet.

If you notice any problems, we kindly ask you to let us know about it. Please send us also the model of your device and browser you used.

Your contribution is very valuable to guarantee the quality of the service provided to the community.

Arquivo.pt improves advanced search

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Last updated on August 4th, 2024 at 05:57 pm

Arquivo.pt launched a new version on June 23, 2017 called Venus, in which the Advanced Search operators were improved.

It stands out the improvement of the search operator site that allows to restrict searches to certain preserved sites. For example:

The reproduction of preserved pages containing error messages was also reduced.

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Scientific study presents a search log analysis of a search engine

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Last updated on August 4th, 2024 at 06:00 pm

This research presents a characterization of the information-seeking behaviour of the users of a Portuguese web search engine, based on the analysis of its logs.

The paper A Search Log Analysis of a Portuguese Web Search Engine, by Miguel Costa and Mário J. Silva, was presented at INForum 2010 – Simpósio de Informática, in Braga, Portugal.