Detecting age of page content

Abstract

Web pages often contain objects created at different times. The information about the age of such objects may provide useful context for understanding page content and may serve many potential uses. In this paper, we describe a novel concept for detecting approximate creation dates of content elements in Web pages. Our approach is based on dynamically reconstructing page histories using data extracted from external sources - Web archives and efficiently searching inside them to detect insertion dates of content elements. We discuss various issues involving the proposed approach and demonstrate the example of an application that enhances browsing the Web by inserting annotations with temporal metadata into page content on user request.