AMCIS 2008 panel report: Aging content on the web: Issues, implications,and potential research opportunities

Abstract

Since its inception in the early 1990s,the World Wide Web (Web) has grown enormously. According to the "official Google blog" (Google 2008), the Web had 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique coexisting URL's as of July 25, 2008. Given the exponential growth of the Web over time, an issue that is likely to gain prominence is that of outdated information. This is especially important to study since many of us rely on the Web to find facts in order to take decisions. For example, for students and researchers, the "date" of a document is important for scholarship and student work. However, getting an accurate date on content is challenging, and furthermore, outdated pages that are not deleted from Web servers will continue to be returned in response to Web searches. The panel, held at the 2008 Americas Conference on Information Systems in Toronto, Canada, identified a number of research issues and opportunities that arise as a result of this phenomenon.