Running for 8 hours, without crashing but with a little complaining about bad web pages, my analysis analysed 191,093 web pages (not other file types like images) and found 179 pages that have rel="license" links (a semantic statement that the page is licensed) with a total of 288 rel="license" links (about 1.5 per page). This equates to 1 in 1067 pages using rel="license"

The pages were drawn randomly from the dataset, though I'm not sure that my randomisation is great - I'll look into that. As I said in a previous post, the data aims to be a broad crawl of Australian sites, but it's neither 100% complete nor 100% accurate about sites being Australian.

By my calculations, if I were to run my analysis on the whole dataset, I'd expect to find approximately 1.3 million pages using rel="licence". But keep in mind that I'm not only running the analysis over three years of data, but that data also sometimes includes the same page more than once for a given year/crawl, though much more rarely than, say, the Wayback Machine does.

And of course, this statistic says nothing about open content licensing. I'm sure, as in I know, there are lots more pages out there that don't use rel="license".

(Tech note: when doing this kind of analysis, there's a race between I/O and processor time, and ideally they're both maxed out. Over last night's analysis, the CPU load - for the last 15 minutes at least, but I think that's representative - was 58%, suggesting that I/O is so far the limiting factor.)

Labels: ben, quantification, research