An Experiment on Visible Changes of Web Pages

Since web pages are created, changed, and destroyed constantly, web databases (local collections of web pages) should be updated to maintain web pages up-to-date. In order to effectively keep web databases fresh, a number of studies on the change detection of web pages have been carried out, and various web statistics have been reported in the literature. This paper considers the issues of web page changes in terms of user visuality. First, we consider the effect of a number of tags that do not make difference in terms of user visuality. We learned that approximately 4.5% of web page changes under the byte-wise comparison were unnecessarily determined. Secondly, we investigated the relationship between ‘TITLE’ tags and ‘BODY’ tags in terms of web page changes. We found out that an inspection of ‘TITLE’ tags could allow users to sufficiently determine the change of web pages, so that we can significantly reduce the comparison time of web pages.