Monitoring the Internet evolution adaptation in heavily-visited search services

This paper proposes an innovative method of monitoring the ability of Internet search services to maintain new and up-to-date results in their directories. The method is based on capture-recapture experiments performed in real wildlife biological studies. After the necessary modifications needed for conducting similar experiments on the Web, a sixteen-week period of capture-recapture experiments was made over the caches of Google and MSN. During this period the birth as well as the survival rates of Google´s and MSN´s cached results were estimated based on the Pollock´s robust design method. The paper provides the implementation details of the applied model along with its initial assessment. The experimental results showed that this approach can be applied as a method for measuring the ability of Internet search services in terms of maintaining new and up-to-date results in their caches.