Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

  Figure 1: An example web page that loaded Google ads.  WACZ | URI-R: https://www.ign.com/tv/the-last-of-us-the-series   For the Saving Ads project , we have focused on identifying problems with archiving and replaying web advertisements. This blog post will describe the replay problems we encountered while working on the project. A technical report with more information will be posted soon. There were three replay problems that prevented ads from being replayed: The first problem involves Google ( AdSense and Ad Manager ) and Amazon ( Ad Server ) ad services dynamically generating URLs with random values that prevent an ad from being replayed, because the random number generator’s seed is not the same during the crawl and replay sessions.  The JavaScript from the Flashtalking ad service caused the second problem of replaying an embedded web page ad outside of an ad iframe.  The last problem was ads not loading during replay depending on the web browser. Goo...