User Guide
The Extinct Websites Database is a specialized public database that displays in a structured form the data collected by the Extinct Websites application. Its aim is to report on disappearing web content through statistics from which it will be possible to get an idea of trends over time. The database includes resources assessed as extinct at a specific point in time. Due to the changing nature of the web (websites disappear, renew their activity, change their content or move to a different address), no resource can be definitively marked as dead.
The database contains several parameters based on the API of our Extinct websites application. The list is listed below:
- URLs - a list of URLs of resources linked to archived copies of the Webarchive.
- Date of death detected - the date we detected the death of the web resource
- Status code - the last detected HTTPS code
- The date from which the web resource was recorded
- Deadness index - an index we use to evaluate the threat to the resource, which consists of several parameters (page metadata, page content, information from the whois database). If a "cross" appears, the deadness index could not be calculated due to insufficient data.
Fig.1 The main indicator is a graph that allows you to see the death of sites over time. We also show as an important figure the number of dead websites identified so far and the percentage of the total number of monitored websites.
Fig.2 Next, we show the user two main tables - the list of dead websites overall, which can be downloaded in CSV format, plus a list of all trackable websites (Fig.3), also available for CSV/ XLSX download. The same will be produced as a summary statistic/report for each of the previous years once the annual limit is reached (Fig.4).
Fig. 3
Fig. 4 Closed report for a given past year.