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Methodologies for crawler based Web surveys

Mike Thelwall (Mike Thelwall is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing and Information Technology at the University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK)

Internet Research

ISSN: 1066-2243

Article publication date: 1 May 2002

2269

Abstract

There have been many attempts to study the content of the Web, either through human or automatic agents. Describes five different previously used Web survey methodologies, each justifiable in its own right, but presents a simple experiment that demonstrates concrete differences between them. The concept of crawling the Web also bears further inspection, including the scope of the pages to crawl, the method used to access and index each page, and the algorithm for the identification of duplicate pages. The issues involved here will be well‐known to many computer scientists but, with the increasing use of crawlers and search engines in other disciplines, they now require a public discussion in the wider research community. Concludes that any scientific attempt to crawl the Web must make available the parameters under which it is operating so that researchers can, in principle, replicate experiments or be aware of and take into account differences between methodologies. Also introduces a new hybrid random page selection methodology.

Keywords

Citation

Thelwall, M. (2002), "Methodologies for crawler based Web surveys", Internet Research, Vol. 12 No. 2, pp. 124-138. https://doi.org/10.1108/10662240210422503

Publisher

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MCB UP Ltd

Copyright © 2002, MCB UP Limited

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