WASP: Web Archiving and Search Personalized Johannes Kiesel Arjen P. de Vries Matthias Hagen Bauhaus-Universität Weimar Radboud University Martin-Luther-Universität Weimar, Germany Nijmegen, The Netherlands Halle-Wittenberg johannes.kiesel@uni-weimar.de a.devries@cs.ru.nl Halle, Germany matthias.hagen@informatik. uni-halle.de Benno Stein Martin Potthast Bauhaus-Universität Weimar Leipzig University Weimar, Germany Leipzig, Germany benno.stein@uni-weimar.de martin.potthast@uni-leipzig.de ABSTRACT apparently, do the aforementioned tools index the content of web Logging and re-finding the information we encounter every day pages visited, but only their titles and URLs. In fact, the possibility while browsing the web is a non-trivial task that is, at best, in- to track (let alone search) one’s browsing history using off-the-shelf adequately supported by existing tools. It is time to take another tools is still fairly limited. step forward: we introduce WASP, a fully functional prototype of a In this context, it is not surprising that personal information personal web archive and search system, which is available open access was one of the major topics discussed at the Third Strategic source and as an executable Docker image. Based on the experiences Workshop on Information Retrieval in Lorne (SWIRL 2018) [4]. and insights gained while designing and using WASP, we outline The attendees noted that this problem, open for so long, has not how personal web archive and search systems can be implemented, been addressed adequately, and, worse, that it is an ever more discuss what technological and privacy-related challenges such daunting challenge to help people re-find and re-visit their online systems face, and propose a setup to evaluate their effectiveness. information and prior information interactions with these sources; As a key insight, we argue that the indexing and retrieval for a as this information today resides in multiple devices and a large personal archive search can be strongly tailored towards a specific variety of information services, that each construct their own data user and their behavior on the visited pages compared to regular silos and search APIs (if such access is offered at all). Specifically, web search. the report mentions the high cost of entry for scientists as a major obstacle, where “there is substantial engineering required for a 1 INTRODUCTION minimal working system: to fetch data from different silos, parse different data formats, and monitor user activity.” Lifelogging1 has become a common practice, as a result of the om- We propose to take a pragmatic “shortcut” and to establish em- nipresence of smartphones, smart watches and fitness trackers, and pirically how far that workaround can bring us. Increasingly, access emerging technologies such as smart glasses, wearable technologies to our digital information takes place through the web browser and sensor-enabled smart homes. Isn’t it surprising that keeping as the interface. Therefore, we set out to develop WASP, a proto- track of one’s online activities is comparably underdeveloped? Sig- type system for personal web archiving and search. WASP saves nificant amount of work has been invested into understanding one’s personal web browsing history using state-of-the-art web personal information management [10] and developing tools to archiving technology and offers a powerful retrieval interface over support it, including the winner of the SIGIR 2014 Test of Time that history. This browser-focused setup enables the user to recall Award “Stuff I’ve Seen” (SIS) by Dumais et al. [6]. With a bit of irony information they personally gathered without the need to deal with however, neither SIS nor follow-up Phlat [5] are available today, the large variety of information sources. Even if we do not cover the even if the key insights gained have likely informed the develop- full range of digital objects that may accrue on a person’s desktop ment of Windows desktop search and intelligent assistant Cortana. and mobile devices, high-quality archival of web pages visited may Likewise, Spotlight on MacOS supports search over local documents capture a large fraction of the information we interact with. and other digital assets. Both are integrated with the web browsers In addition to a detailed technical description of WASP in Sec- from Microsoft and Apple, respectively, to index browsing history. tion 2, this paper reports on the observations that we made (Sec- Meanwhile, the history tabs of modern Web browsers provide ac- tion 3) and the challenges for personal web archiving and search cess to the history of the currently open browser as well as pages that we identified (Section 4) through our extensive use of the recently visited on other devices. However, current browsers do WASP prototype—which we provide both open source and as an not align and integrate the browsing histories across devices, nor, executable Docker container so that others can use it within their 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifelog research or personal lifelogging setup.2, 3 DESIRES 2018, August 2018, Bertinoro, Italy 2 https://hub.docker.com/r/webis/wasp/ © 2018 Copyright held by the author(s). 3 https://github.com/webis-de/wasp DESIRES 2018, August 2018, Bertinoro, Italy Johannes Kiesel, Arjen P. de Vries, Matthias Hagen, Benno Stein, and Martin Potthast 2 THE WASP PROTOTYPE The WASP 4 prototype integrates existing archiving, indexing, and Search Interface Index reproduction technology for the first time into a single application. Figure 1 illustrates how the user’s browser interacts through WASP pywb World Wide Web WARCs with the World Wide Web under the three usage scenarios archival, Browser search, and reproduction of web pages, as detailed below. proxy warcprox 2.1 Archiving Proxy and Indexing (a) After starting WASP, the user has to reconfigure his or her browser to accept WASP as forward proxy and to trust its certificate. WASP then archives all HTTP(S) requests and responses from and to the /search Search browser in the standard Web archiving format (WARC) (Figure 1 (a)). Interface Index This is achieved using the Internet Archive’s warcprox software,5 World Wide Web whose WARC contain all the information necessary to reproduce pywb WARCs an archived browsing session at a later time. Browser In order to enable searching the archived content, we devised a warcprox software component that monitors WARC files and automatically indexes HTML responses and their corresponding requests in an (b) ElasticSearch index.6 In detail, we use the Lemur project’s WARC parser7 and Apache’s HttpClient library8 to read HTTP messages as they are appended to the WARC files. The title and text of the Search Interface Index HTTP responses that have the MIME type HTML are extracted from responses using the Jericho HTML Parser library.9 The title and /archive/