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First steps in archiving the mobile web: automated discovery of mobile websites

Online:22 July 2013Publication History

ABSTRACT

Smartphones and tablets are increasingly used to access the Web, and many websites now provide alternative sites tailored specifically for these mobile devices. Web archivists are in need of tools to aid in archiving this equally ephemeral Mobile Web. We present Findmobile, a tool for automating the discovery of mobile websites. We tested our tool in an experiment examining 10K popular websites and found that the most frequently used technique used by popular websites to direct mobile users to mobile sites was by automated client and server-side redirection. We found that nearly half of mobile web pages differ dramatically from their stationary web counterparts and that the most popular websites are those most likely to have mobile-specific pages.

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        • Published in

          ACM Conferences cover image
          JCDL '13: Proceedings of the 13th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries
          July 2013
          480 pages
          ISBN:9781450320771
          DOI:10.1145/2467696

          Copyright © 2013 ACM

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          Association for Computing Machinery

          New York, NY, United States

          Publication History

          • Online: 22 July 2013

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