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





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