web research paper

web development Recently Published Documents

Total documents.

• Latest Documents
• Most Cited Documents
• Contributed Authors
• Related Sources
• Related Keywords

Website Developmemt Technologies: A Review

Abstract: Service Science is that the basis of knowledge system and net services that judge to the provider/client model. This paper developments a technique which will be utilized in the event of net services like websites, net applications and eCommerce. The goal is to development a technique that may add structure to a extremely unstructured drawback to help within the development and success of net services. The new methodology projected are going to be referred to as {the net|the online|the net} Development Life Cycle (WDLC) and tailored from existing methodologies and applied to the context of web development. This paper can define well the projected phases of the WDLC. Keywords: Web Development, Application Development, Technologies, eCommerce.

Analysis of Russian Segment of the Web Development Market Operating Online on Upwork

The Russian segment of the web services market in the online environment, on the platform of the Upwork freelance exchange, is considered, its key characteristics, the composition of participants, development trends are highlighted, and the market structure is identified. It is found that despite the low barriers to entry, the web development market is very stable, since the composition of entrenched firms that have been operating for more than six years remains. The pricing policy of most Russian companies indicates that they work in the middle price segment and have low budgets, which is due to the specifics of the foreign market and high competition.

Farming Assistant Web Services: Agricultor

Abstract: Our farming assistant web services provides assistance to new as well as establish farmers to get the solutions to dayto-day problems faced in the field. A farmer gets to connect with other farmers throughout India to get more information about a particular crop which is popular in other states. Keywords: Farmers, Assistance, Web Development

Tradução de ementas e histórico escolar para o inglês: contribuição para participação de discentes do curso técnico em informática para internet integrado ao ensino médio em programas de mobilidade acadêmica / Translation of summary and school records into english: contribution to the participation of high school with associate technical degree on web development students in academic mobility programs

Coded websites vs wordpress websites.

This document gives multiple instructions related to web developers using older as well as newer technology. Websites are being created using newer technologies like wordpress whereas on the other hand many people prefer making websites using the traditional way. This document will clear the doubt whether an individual should use wordpress websites or coded websites according to the users convenience. The Responsiveness of the websites, the use of CMS nowadays, more and more up gradation of technologies with SEO, themes, templates, etc. make things like web development much much easier. The aesthetics, the culture, the expressions, the features all together add up in order make the designing and development a lot more efficient and effective. Digital Marketing has a tremendous growth over the last two years and yet shows no signs of stopping, is closely related with the web development environment. Nowadays all businesses are going online due to which the impact of web development has become such that it has become an integral part of any online business.

Cognitive disabilities and web accessibility: a survey into the Brazilian web development community

Cognitive disabilities include a diversity of conditions related to cognitive functions, such as reading, understanding, learning, solving problems, memorization and speaking. They differ largely from each other, making them a heterogeneous complex set of disabilities. Although the awareness about cognitive disabilities has been increasing in the last few years, it is still less than necessary compared to other disabilities. The need for an investigation about this issue is part of the agenda of the Challenge 2 (Accessibility and Digital Inclusion) from GranDIHC-Br. This paper describes the results of an online exploratory survey conducted with 105 web development professionals from different sectors to understand their knowledge and barriers regarding accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities. The results evidenced three biases that potentially prevent those professionals from approaching cogni-tive disabilities: strong organizational barriers; difficulty to understand user needs related to cognitive disabilities; a knowledge gap about web accessibility principles and guidelines. Our results confirmed that web development professionals are unaware about cognitive disabilities mostly by a lack of knowledge about them, even if they understand web accessibility in a technical level. Therefore, we suggest that applied research studies focus on how to fill this knowledge gap before providing tools, artifacts or frameworks.

PERANCANGAN WEB RESPONSIVE UNTUK SISTEM INFORMASI OBAT-OBATAN

A good information system must not only be neat, effective, and resilient, but also must be user friendly and up to date. In a sense, it is able to be applied to various types of electronic devices, easily accessible at any whereand time (real time), and can be modified according to user needs in a relatively easy and simple way. Information systems are now needed by various parties, especially in the field of administration and sale of medicines for Cut Nyak Dhien Hospital. During this time, recording in books has been very ineffective and caused many problems, such as difficulty in accessing old data, asa well as the information obtained was not real time. To solve it, this research raises the theme of the appropriate information system design for the hospital concerned, by utilizing CSS Bootstrap framework and research methodology for web development, namely Web Development Life Cycle. This research resulted in a responsive system by providing easy access through desktop computers, tablets, and smartphones so that it would help the hospital in the data processing process in real time.

Web Development and performance comparison of Web Development Technologies in Node.js and Python

“tom had us all doing front-end web development”: a nostalgic (re)imagining of myspace, assessment of site classifications according to layout type in web development, export citation format, share document.

Reference management. Clean and simple.

The top list of academic search engines

1. Google Scholar

4. science.gov, 5. semantic scholar, 6. baidu scholar, get the most out of academic search engines, frequently asked questions about academic search engines, related articles.

Academic search engines have become the number one resource to turn to in order to find research papers and other scholarly sources. While classic academic databases like Web of Science and Scopus are locked behind paywalls, Google Scholar and others can be accessed free of charge. In order to help you get your research done fast, we have compiled the top list of free academic search engines.

Google Scholar is the clear number one when it comes to academic search engines. It's the power of Google searches applied to research papers and patents. It not only lets you find research papers for all academic disciplines for free but also often provides links to full-text PDF files.

• Coverage: approx. 200 million articles
• Abstracts: only a snippet of the abstract is available
• Related articles: ✔
• References: ✔
• Cited by: ✔
• Links to full text: ✔
• Export formats: APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver, RIS, BibTeX

BASE is hosted at Bielefeld University in Germany. That is also where its name stems from (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine).

• Coverage: approx. 136 million articles (contains duplicates)
• Abstracts: ✔
• Related articles: ✘
• References: ✘
• Cited by: ✘
• Export formats: RIS, BibTeX

CORE is an academic search engine dedicated to open-access research papers. For each search result, a link to the full-text PDF or full-text web page is provided.

• Coverage: approx. 136 million articles
• Links to full text: ✔ (all articles in CORE are open access)
• Export formats: BibTeX

Science.gov is a fantastic resource as it bundles and offers free access to search results from more than 15 U.S. federal agencies. There is no need anymore to query all those resources separately!

• Coverage: approx. 200 million articles and reports
• Links to full text: ✔ (available for some databases)
• Export formats: APA, MLA, RIS, BibTeX (available for some databases)

Semantic Scholar is the new kid on the block. Its mission is to provide more relevant and impactful search results using AI-powered algorithms that find hidden connections and links between research topics.

• Coverage: approx. 40 million articles
• Export formats: APA, MLA, Chicago, BibTeX

Although Baidu Scholar's interface is in Chinese, its index contains research papers in English as well as Chinese.

• Coverage: no detailed statistics available, approx. 100 million articles
• Abstracts: only snippets of the abstract are available
• Export formats: APA, MLA, RIS, BibTeX

RefSeek searches more than one billion documents from academic and organizational websites. Its clean interface makes it especially easy to use for students and new researchers.

• Coverage: no detailed statistics available, approx. 1 billion documents
• Abstracts: only snippets of the article are available
• Export formats: not available

Consider using a reference manager like Paperpile to save, organize, and cite your references. Paperpile integrates with Google Scholar and many popular databases, so you can save references and PDFs directly to your library using the Paperpile buttons:

Google Scholar is an academic search engine, and it is the clear number one when it comes to academic search engines. It's the power of Google searches applied to research papers and patents. It not only let's you find research papers for all academic disciplines for free, but also often provides links to full text PDF file.

Semantic Scholar is a free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature developed at the Allen Institute for AI. Sematic Scholar was publicly released in 2015 and uses advances in natural language processing to provide summaries for scholarly papers.

BASE , as its name suggest is an academic search engine. It is hosted at Bielefeld University in Germany and that's where it name stems from (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine).

CORE is an academic search engine dedicated to open access research papers. For each search result a link to the full text PDF or full text web page is provided.

Science.gov is a fantastic resource as it bundles and offers free access to search results from more than 15 U.S. federal agencies. There is no need any more to query all those resources separately!

Publications

Our teams aspire to make discoveries that impact everyone, and core to our approach is sharing our research and tools to fuel progress in the field.

• Algorithms and Optimization 323
• Applied science 186
• Climate and Sustainability 10
• Cloud AI 46
• Euphonia 12
• Language 235
• Perception 291

Research Area

• Algorithms and Theory 1327
• Data Management 167
• Data Mining and Modeling 355
• Distributed Systems and Parallel Computing 344
• Economics and Electronic Commerce 340
• Education Innovation 70
• General Science 330
• Hardware and Architecture 146
• Health & Bioscience 368
• Human-Computer Interaction and Visualization 818
• Information Retrieval and the Web 420
• Machine Intelligence 3825
• Machine Perception 1469
• Machine Translation 146
• Mobile Systems 107
• Natural Language Processing 1076
• Networking 318
• Quantum Computing 126
• Responsible AI 224
• Robotics 198
• Security, Privacy and Abuse Prevention 496
• Software Engineering 203
• Software Systems 450
• Speech Processing 545
• Title, descending
• Year, descending

Learn more about how we conduct our research

We maintain a portfolio of research projects, providing individuals and teams the freedom to emphasize specific types of work.

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• HHS Author Manuscripts

A Literature Review: Website Design and User Engagement

Renee garett.

1 ElevateU, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Sean D. Young

2 University of California Institute for Prediction Technology, Department of Family Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

3 UCLA Center for Digital Behavior, Department of Family Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Proper design has become a critical element needed to engage website and mobile application users. However, little research has been conducted to define the specific elements used in effective website and mobile application design. We attempt to review and consolidate research on effective design and to define a short list of elements frequently used in research. The design elements mentioned most frequently in the reviewed literature were navigation, graphical representation, organization, content utility, purpose, simplicity, and readability. We discuss how previous studies define and evaluate these seven elements. This review and the resulting short list of design elements may be used to help designers and researchers to operationalize best practices for facilitating and predicting user engagement.

1. INTRODUCTION

Internet usage has increased tremendously and rapidly in the past decade ( “Internet Use Over Time,” 2014 ). Websites have become the most important public communication portal for most, if not all, businesses and organizations. As of 2014, 87% of American adults aged 18 or older are Internet users ( “Internet User Demographics,” 2013 ). Because business-to-consumer interactions mainly occur online, website design is critical in engaging users ( Flavián, Guinalíu, & Gurrea, 2006 ; Lee & Kozar, 2012 ; Petre, Minocha, & Roberts, 2006 ). Poorly designed websites may frustrate users and result in a high “bounce rate”, or people visiting the entrance page without exploring other pages within the site ( Google.com, 2015 ). On the other hand, a well-designed website with high usability has been found to positively influence visitor retention (revisit rates) and purchasing behavior ( Avouris, Tselios, Fidas, & Papachristos, 2003 ; Flavián et al., 2006 ; Lee & Kozar, 2012 ).

Little research, however, has been conducted to define the specific elements that constitute effective website design. One of the key design measures is usability ( International Standardization Organization, 1998 ). The International Standardized Organization (ISO) defines usability as the extent to which users can achieve desired tasks (e.g., access desired information or place a purchase) with effectiveness (completeness and accuracy of the task), efficiency (time spent on the task), and satisfaction (user experience) within a system. However, there is currently no consensus on how to properly operationalize and assess website usability ( Lee & Kozar, 2012 ). For example, Nielson associates usability with learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, and satisfaction ( Nielsen, 2012 ). Yet, Palmer (2002) postulates that usability is determined by download time, navigation, content, interactivity, and responsiveness. Similar to usability, many other key design elements, such as scannability, readability, and visual aesthetics, have not yet been clearly defined ( Bevan, 1997 ; Brady & Phillips, 2003 ; Kim, Lee, Han, & Lee, 2002 ), and there are no clear guidelines that individuals can follow when designing websites to increase engagement.

This review sought to address that question by identifying and consolidating the key website design elements that influence user engagement according to prior research studies. This review aimed to determine the website design elements that are most commonly shown or suggested to increase user engagement. Based on these findings, we listed and defined a short list of website design elements that best facilitate and predict user engagement. The work is thus an exploratory research providing definitions for these elements of website design and a starting point for future research to reference.

2. MATERIALS AND METHODS

2.1. selection criteria and data extraction.

We searched for articles relating to website design on Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) because Google Scholar consolidates papers across research databases (e.g., Pubmed) and research on design is listed in multiple databases. We used the following combination of keywords: design, usability, and websites. Google Scholar yielded 115,000 total hits. However, due to the large list of studies generated, we decided to only review the top 100 listed research studies for this exploratory study. Our inclusion criteria for the studies was: (1) publication in a peer-reviewed academic journal, (2) publication in English, and (3) publication in or after 2000. Year of publication was chosen as a limiting factor so that we would have enough years of research to identify relevant studies but also have results that relate to similar styles of websites after the year 2000. We included studies that were experimental or theoretical (review papers and commentaries) in nature. Resulting studies represented a diverse range of disciplines, including human-computer interaction, marketing, e-commerce, interface design, cognitive science, and library science. Based on these selection criteria, thirty-five unique studies remained and were included in this review.

2.2. Final Search Term

(design) and (usability) and (websites).

The search terms were kept simple to capture the higher level design/usability papers and allow Google scholar’s ranking method to filter out the most popular studies. This method also allowed studies from a large range of fields to be searched.

2.3. Analysis

The literature review uncovered 20 distinct design elements commonly discussed in research that affect user engagement. They were (1) organization – is the website logically organized, (2) content utility – is the information provided useful or interesting, (3) navigation – is the website easy to navigate, (4) graphical representation – does the website utilize icons, contrasting colors, and multimedia content, (5) purpose – does the website clearly state its purpose (i.e. personal, commercial, or educational), (6) memorable elements – does the website facilitate returning users to navigate the site effectively (e.g., through layout or graphics), (7) valid links – does the website provide valid links, (8) simplicity – is the design of the website simple, (9) impartiality – is the information provided fair and objective, (10) credibility – is the information provided credible, (11) consistency/reliability – is the website consistently designed (i.e., no changes in page layout throughout the site), (12) accuracy – is the information accurate, (13) loading speed – does the website take a long time to load, (14) security/privacy – does the website securely transmit, store, and display personal information/data, (15) interactive – can the user interact with the website (e.g., post comments or receive recommendations for similar purchases), (16) strong user control capabilities– does the website allow individuals to customize their experiences (such as the order of information they access and speed at which they browse the website), (17) readability – is the website easy to read and understand (e.g., no grammatical/spelling errors), (18) efficiency – is the information presented in a way that users can find the information they need quickly, (19) scannability – can users pick out relevant information quickly, and (20) learnability – how steep is the learning curve for using the website. For each of the above, we calculated the proportion of studies mentioning the element. In this review, we provide a threshold value of 30%. We identified elements that were used in at least 30% of the studies and include these elements that are above the threshold on a short list of elements used in research on proper website design. The 30% value was an arbitrary threshold picked that would provide researchers and designers with a guideline list of elements described in research on effective web design. To provide further information on how to apply this list, we present specific details on how each of these elements was discussed in research so that it can be defined and operationalized.

3.1. Popular website design elements ( Table 1 )

Frequency of website design elements used in research (2000–2014)

Seven of the website design elements met our threshold requirement for review. Navigation was the most frequently discussed element, mentioned in 22 articles (62.86%). Twenty-one studies (60%) highlighted the importance of graphics. Fifteen studies (42.86%) emphasized good organization. Four other elements also exceeded the threshold level, and they were content utility (n=13, 37.14%), purpose (n=11, 31.43%), simplicity (n=11, 31.43%), and readability (n=11, 31.43%).

Elements below our minimum requirement for review include memorable features (n=5, 14.29%), links (n=10, 28.57%), impartiality (n=1, 2.86%), credibility (n=7, 20%), consistency/reliability (n=8. 22.86%), accuracy (n=5, 14.29%), loading speed (n=10, 28.57%), security/privacy (n=2, 5.71%), interactive features (n=9, 25.71%), strong user control capabilities (n=8, 22.86%), efficiency (n=6, 17.14%), scannability (n=1, 2.86%), and learnability (n=2, 5.71%).

3.2. Defining key design elements for user engagement ( Table 2 )

Definitions of Key Design Elements

In defining and operationalizing each of these elements, the research studies suggested that effective navigation is the presence of salient and consistent menu/navigation bars, aids for navigation (e.g., visible links), search features, and easy access to pages (multiple pathways and limited clicks/backtracking). Engaging graphical presentation entails 1) inclusion of images, 2) proper size and resolution of images, 3) multimedia content, 4) proper color, font, and size of text, 5) use of logos and icons, 6) attractive visual layout, 7) color schemes, and 8) effective use of white space. Optimal organization includes 1) cognitive architecture, 2) logical, understandable, and hierarchical structure, 3) information arrangement and categorization, 4) meaningful labels/headings/titles, and 5) use of keywords. Content utility is determined by 1) sufficient amount of information to attract repeat visitors, 2) arousal/motivation (keeps visitors interested and motivates users to continue exploring the site), 3) content quality, 4) information relevant to the purpose of the site, and 5) perceived utility based on user needs/requirements. The purpose of a website is clear when it 1) establishes a unique and visible brand/identity, 2) addresses visitors’ intended purpose and expectations for visiting the site, and 3) provides information about the organization and/or services. Simplicity is achieved by using 1) simple subject headings, 2) transparency of information (reduce search time), 3) website design optimized for computer screens, 4) uncluttered layout, 5) consistency in design throughout website, 6) ease of using (including first-time users), 7) minimize redundant features, and 8) easily understandable functions. Readability is optimized by content that is 1) easy to read, 2) well-written, 3) grammatically correct, 4) understandable, 5) presented in readable blocks, and 6) reading level appropriate.

4. DISCUSSION

The seven website design elements most often discussed in relation to user engagement in the reviewed studies were navigation (62.86%), graphical representation (60%), organization (42.86%), content utility (37.14%), purpose (31.43%), simplicity (31.43%), and readability (31.43%). These seven elements exceeded our threshold level of 30% representation in the literature and were included into a short list of website design elements to operationalize effective website design. For further analysis, we reviewed how studies defined and evaluated these seven elements. This may allow designers and researchers to determine and follow best practices for facilitating or predicting user engagement.

A remaining challenge is that the definitions of website design elements often overlap. For example, several studies evaluated organization by how well a website incorporates cognitive architecture, logical and hierarchical structure, systematic information arrangement and categorization, meaningful headings and labels, and keywords. However, these features are also crucial in navigation design. Also, the implications of using distinct logos and icons go beyond graphical representation. Logos and icons also establish unique brand/identity for the organization (purpose) and can serve as visual aids for navigation. Future studies are needed to develop distinct and objective measures to assess these elements and how they affect user engagement ( Lee & Kozar, 2012 ).

Given the rapid increase in both mobile technology and social media use, it is surprising that no studies mentioned cross-platform compatibility and social media integration. In 2013, 34% of cellphone owners primarily use their cellphones to access the Internet, and this number continues to grow ( “Mobile Technology Factsheet,” 2013 ). With the rise of different mobile devices, users are also diversifying their web browser use. Internet Explorer (IE) was once the leading web browser. However, in recent years, FireFox, Safari, and Chrome have gained significant traction ( W3schools.com, 2015 ). Website designers and researchers must be mindful of different platforms and browsers to minimize the risk of losing users due to compatibility issues. In addition, roughly 74% of American Internet users use some form of social media ( Duggan, Ellison, Lampe, Lenhart, & Smith, 2015 ), and social media has emerged as an effective platform for organizations to target and interact with users. Integrating social media into website design may increase user engagement by facilitating participation and interactivity.

There are several limitations to the current review. First, due to the large number of studies published in this area and due to this study being exploratory, we selected from the first 100 research publications on Google Scholar search results. Future studies may benefit from defining design to a specific topic, set of years, or other area to limit the number of search results. Second, we did not quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of these website design elements. Additional research can help to better quantify these elements.

It should also be noted that different disciplines and industries have different objectives in designing websites and should thus prioritize different website design elements. For example, online businesses and marketers seek to design websites that optimize brand loyalty, purchase, and profit ( Petre et al., 2006 ). Others, such as academic researchers or healthcare providers, are more likely to prioritize privacy/confidentiality, and content accuracy in building websites ( Horvath, Ecklund, Hunt, Nelson, & Toomey, 2015 ). Ultimately, we advise website designers and researchers to consider the design elements delineated in this review, along with their unique needs, when developing user engagement strategies.

• Arroyo Ernesto, Selker Ted, Wei Willy. Usability tool for analysis of web designs using mouse tracks. Paper presented at the CHI’06 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems.2006. [ Google Scholar ]
• Atterer Richard, Wnuk Monika, Schmidt Albrecht. Knowing the user’s every move: user activity tracking for website usability evaluation and implicit interaction. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web.2006. [ Google Scholar ]
• Auger Pat. The impact of interactivity and design sophistication on the performance of commercial websites for small businesses. Journal of Small Business Management. 2005; 43 (2):119–137. [ Google Scholar ]
• Avouris Nikolaos, Tselios Nikolaos, Fidas Christos, Papachristos Eleftherios. Advances in Informatics. Springer; 2003. Website evaluation: A usability-based perspective; pp. 217–231. [ Google Scholar ]
• Banati Hema, Bedi Punam, Grover PS. Evaluating web usability from the user’s perspective. Journal of Computer Science. 2006; 2 (4):314. [ Google Scholar ]
• Belanche Daniel, Casaló Luis V, Guinalíu Miguel. Website usability, consumer satisfaction and the intention to use a website: The moderating effect of perceived risk. Journal of retailing and consumer services. 2012; 19 (1):124–132. [ Google Scholar ]
• Bevan Nigel. Usability issues in web site design. Paper presented at the HCI; 1997. [ Google Scholar ]
• Blackmon Marilyn Hughes, Kitajima Muneo, Polson Peter G. Repairing usability problems identified by the cognitive walkthrough for the web. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems.2003. [ Google Scholar ]
• Blackmon Marilyn Hughes, Polson Peter G, Kitajima Muneo, Lewis Clayton. Cognitive walkthrough for the web. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems.2002. [ Google Scholar ]
• Braddy Phillip W, Meade Adam W, Kroustalis Christina M. Online recruiting: The effects of organizational familiarity, website usability, and website attractiveness on viewers’ impressions of organizations. Computers in Human Behavior. 2008; 24 (6):2992–3001. [ Google Scholar ]
• Brady Laurie, Phillips Christine. Aesthetics and usability: A look at color and balance. Usability News. 2003; 5 (1) [ Google Scholar ]
• Cyr Dianne, Head Milena, Larios Hector. Colour appeal in website design within and across cultures: A multi-method evaluation. International journal of human-computer studies. 2010; 68 (1):1–21. [ Google Scholar ]
• Cyr Dianne, Ilsever Joe, Bonanni Carole, Bowes John. Website Design and Culture: An Empirical Investigation. Paper presented at the IWIPS.2004. [ Google Scholar ]
• Dastidar Surajit Ghosh. Impact of the factors influencing website usability on user satisfaction. 2009. [ Google Scholar ]
• De Angeli Antonella, Sutcliffe Alistair, Hartmann Jan. Interaction, usability and aesthetics: what influences users’ preferences?. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 6th conference on Designing Interactive systems.2006. [ Google Scholar ]
• Djamasbi Soussan, Siegel Marisa, Tullis Tom. Generation Y, web design, and eye tracking. International journal of human-computer studies. 2010; 68 (5):307–323. [ Google Scholar ]
• Djonov Emilia. Website hierarchy and the interaction between content organization, webpage and navigation design: A systemic functional hypermedia discourse analysis perspective. Information Design Journal. 2007; 15 (2):144–162. [ Google Scholar ]
• Duggan M, Ellison N, Lampe C, Lenhart A, Smith A. Social Media update 2014. Washington, D.C: Pew Research Center; 2015. [ Google Scholar ]
• Flavián Carlos, Guinalíu Miguel, Gurrea Raquel. The role played by perceived usability, satisfaction and consumer trust on website loyalty. Information & Management. 2006; 43 (1):1–14. [ Google Scholar ]
• George Carole A. Usability testing and design of a library website: an iterative approach. OCLC Systems & Services: International digital library perspectives. 2005; 21 (3):167–180. [ Google Scholar ]
• Google.com. Bounce Rate. Analyrics Help. 2015 Retrieved 2/11, 2015, from https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1009409?hl=en .
• Green D, Pearson JM. Development of a web site usability instrument based on ISO 9241-11. Journal of Computer Information Systems. 2006 Fall [ Google Scholar ]
• Horvath Keith J, Ecklund Alexandra M, Hunt Shanda L, Nelson Toben F, Toomey Traci L. Developing Internet-Based Health Interventions: A Guide for Public Health Researchers and Practitioners. J Med Internet Res. 2015; 17 (1):e28. doi: 10.2196/jmir.3770. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• International Standardization Organization. ISO 2941-11:1998 Ergonomic requirements for office work with visual display terminals (VDTs) -- Part 11: Guidance on usability: International Standardization Organization (ISO) 1998. [ Google Scholar ]
• Internet Use Over Time. 2014 Jan 2; Retrieved February 15, 2015, from http://www.pewinternet.org/data-trend/internet-use/internet-use-over-time/
• Internet User Demographics. 2013 Nov 14; Retrieved February 11, 2015, from http://www.pewinternet.org/data-trend/internet-use/latest-stats/
• Kim Jinwoo, Lee Jungwon, Han Kwanghee, Lee Moonkyu. Businesses as Buildings: Metrics for the Architectural Quality of Internet Businesses. Information Systems Research. 2002; 13 (3):239–254. doi: 10.1287/isre.13.3.239.79. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Lee Younghwa, Kozar Kenneth A. Understanding of website usability: Specifying and measuring constructs and their relationships. Decision Support Systems. 2012; 52 (2):450–463. [ Google Scholar ]
• Lim Sun. The Self-Confrontation Interview: Towards an Enhanced Understanding of Human Factors in Web-based Interaction for Improved Website Usability. J Electron Commerce Res. 2002; 3 (3):162–173. [ Google Scholar ]
• Lowry Paul Benjamin, Spaulding Trent, Wells Taylor, Moody Greg, Moffit Kevin, Madariaga Sebastian. A theoretical model and empirical results linking website interactivity and usability satisfaction. Paper presented at the System Sciences, 2006. HICSS’06. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on.2006. [ Google Scholar ]
• Maurer Steven D, Liu Yuping. Developing effective e-recruiting websites: Insights for managers from marketers. Business Horizons. 2007; 50 (4):305–314. [ Google Scholar ]
• Mobile Technology Fact Sheet. 2013 Dec 27; Retrieved August 5, 2015, from http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/mobile-technology-fact-sheet/
• Nielsen Jakob. Usability 101: introduction to Usability. 2012 Retrieved 2/11, 2015, from http://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-101-introduction-to-usability/
• Palmer Jonathan W. Web Site Usability, Design, and Performance Metrics. Information Systems Research. 2002; 13 (2):151–167. doi: 10.1287/isre.13.2.151.88. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Petre Marian, Minocha Shailey, Roberts Dave. Usability beyond the website: an empirically-grounded e-commerce evaluation instrument for the total customer experience. Behaviour & Information Technology. 2006; 25 (2):189–203. [ Google Scholar ]
• Petrie Helen, Hamilton Fraser, King Neil. Tension, what tension?: Website accessibility and visual design. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 2004 international cross-disciplinary workshop on Web accessibility (W4A).2004. [ Google Scholar ]
• Raward Roslyn. Academic library website design principles: development of a checklist. Australian Academic & Research Libraries. 2001; 32 (2):123–136. [ Google Scholar ]
• Rosen Deborah E, Purinton Elizabeth. Website design: Viewing the web as a cognitive landscape. Journal of Business Research. 2004; 57 (7):787–794. [ Google Scholar ]
• Shneiderman Ben, Hochheiser Harry. Universal usability as a stimulus to advanced interface design. Behaviour & Information Technology. 2001; 20 (5):367–376. [ Google Scholar ]
• Song Jaeki, Zahedi Fatemeh “Mariam”. A theoretical approach to web design in e-commerce: a belief reinforcement model. Management Science. 2005; 51 (8):1219–1235. [ Google Scholar ]
• Sutcliffe Alistair. Interactive systems: design, specification, and verification. Springer; 2001. Heuristic evaluation of website attractiveness and usability; pp. 183–198. [ Google Scholar ]
• Tan Gek Woo, Wei Kwok Kee. An empirical study of Web browsing behaviour: Towards an effective Website design. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications. 2007; 5 (4):261–271. [ Google Scholar ]
• Tarafdar Monideepa, Zhang Jie. Determinants of reach and loyalty-a study of Website performance and implications for Website design. Journal of Computer Information Systems. 2008; 48 (2):16. [ Google Scholar ]
• Thompson Lori Foster, Braddy Phillip W, Wuensch Karl L. E-recruitment and the benefits of organizational web appeal. Computers in Human Behavior. 2008; 24 (5):2384–2398. [ Google Scholar ]
• W3schools.com. Browser Statistics and Trends. Retrieved 1/15, 2015, from http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp .
• Williamson Ian O, Lepak David P, King James. The effect of company recruitment web site orientation on individuals’ perceptions of organizational attractiveness. Journal of Vocational Behavior. 2003; 63 (2):242–263. [ Google Scholar ]
• Zhang Ping, Small Ruth V, Von Dran Gisela M, Barcellos Silvia. A two factor theory for website design. Paper presented at the System Sciences, 2000. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Hawaii International Conference on.2000. [ Google Scholar ]
• Zhang Ping, Von Dran Gisela M. Satisfiers and dissatisfiers: A two-factor model for website design and evaluation. Journal of the American society for information science. 2000; 51 (14):1253–1268. [ Google Scholar ]

Explore millions of high-quality primary sources and images from around the world, including artworks, maps, photographs, and more.

Explore migration issues through a variety of media types

• Part of The Streets are Talking: Public Forms of Creative Expression from Around the World
• Part of The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Winter 2020)
• Part of Cato Institute (Aug. 3, 2021)
• Part of University of California Press
• Part of Open: Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture
• Part of Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter 2012)
• Part of R Street Institute (Nov. 1, 2020)
• Part of Leuven University Press
• Part of UN Secretary-General Papers: Ban Ki-moon (2007-2016)
• Part of Perspectives on Terrorism, Vol. 12, No. 4 (August 2018)
• Part of Leveraging Lives: Serbia and Illegal Tunisian Migration to Europe, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Mar. 1, 2023)
• Part of UCL Press

Harness the power of visual materials—explore more than 3 million images now on JSTOR.

Enhance your scholarly research with underground newspapers, magazines, and journals.

Explore collections in the arts, sciences, and literature from the world’s leading museums, archives, and scholars.

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Trending Articles

• Global burden and strength of evidence for 88 risk factors in 204 countries and 811 subnational locations, 1990-2021: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021. GBD 2021 Risk Factors Collaborators. Lancet. 2024. PMID: 38762324
• Burden of disease scenarios for 204 countries and territories, 2022-2050: a forecasting analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021. GBD 2021 Forecasting Collaborators. Lancet. 2024. PMID: 38762325
• An age-progressive platelet differentiation path from hematopoietic stem cells causes exacerbated thrombosis. Poscablo DM, et al. Cell. 2024. PMID: 38749423
• ARID1A suppresses R-loop-mediated STING-type I interferon pathway activation of anti-tumor immunity. Maxwell MB, et al. Cell. 2024. PMID: 38754421
• Andexanet for Factor Xa Inhibitor-Associated Acute Intracerebral Hemorrhage. Connolly SJ, et al. N Engl J Med. 2024. PMID: 38749032 Clinical Trial.

Latest Literature

• Cochrane Database Syst Rev (3)
• J Biol Chem (2)
• J Clin Endocrinol Metab (1)
• J Clin Invest (2)
• Nature (15)
• PLoS One (94)
• Pediatrics (2)
• Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A (17)

NCBI Literature Resources

MeSH PMC Bookshelf Disclaimer

The PubMed wordmark and PubMed logo are registered trademarks of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Unauthorized use of these marks is strictly prohibited.

Burp Scanner

Burp Suite's web vulnerability scanner

Product comparison

What's the difference between Pro and Enterprise Edition?

Download the latest version of Burp Suite.

PortSwigger Research

Pushing the boundaries of web security, featured research, blind css exfiltration: exfiltrate unknown web pages, smashing the state machine, server-side prototype pollution: black-box detection without the dos, stealing passwords from infosec mastodon - without bypassing csp, follow portswigger research on twitter, latest research articles, making desync attacks easy with trace, using form hijacking to bypass csp, hiding payloads in java source code strings.

View all articles

Read article

Meet the Researchers

James Kettle

Director of Research

Gareth Heyes

@garethheyes

Martin Doyhenard

@tincho_508

Zakhar Fedotkin

@d4d89704243

Evolution of Dark Web Threat Analysis and Detection: A Systematic Approach

Ieee account.

• Change Username/Password
• Update Address

Purchase Details

• Payment Options
• Order History
• View Purchased Documents

Profile Information

• Communications Preferences
• Profession and Education
• Technical Interests
• US & Canada: +1 800 678 4333
• Worldwide: +1 732 981 0060
• Contact & Support
• About IEEE Xplore
• Accessibility
• Terms of Use
• Nondiscrimination Policy
• Privacy & Opting Out of Cookies

A not-for-profit organization, IEEE is the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. © Copyright 2024 IEEE - All rights reserved. Use of this web site signifies your agreement to the terms and conditions.

Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

Read our research on:

Full Topic List

Regions & Countries

• Publications
• Our Methods
• Short Reads
• Tools & Resources

Read Our Research On:

When Online Content Disappears

38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later, table of contents.

• Webpages from the last decade
• Links on government websites
• Links on news websites
• Reference links on Wikipedia
• Posts on Twitter
• Acknowledgments
• Collection and analysis of Twitter data
• Data collection for World Wide Web websites, government websites and news websites
• Data collection for Wikipedia source links
• Evaluating the status of pages and links
• Definition of links

Pew Research Center conducted the analysis to examine how often online content that once existed becomes inaccessible. One part of the study looks at a representative sample of webpages that existed over the past decade to see how many are still accessible today. For this analysis, we collected a sample of pages from the Common Crawl web repository for each year from 2013 to 2023. We then tried to access those pages to see how many still exist.

A second part of the study looks at the links on existing webpages to see how many of those links are still functional. We did this by collecting a large sample of pages from government websites, news websites and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia .

We identified relevant news domains using data from the audience metrics company comScore and relevant government domains (at multiple levels of government) using data from get.gov , the official administrator for the .gov domain. We collected the news and government pages via Common Crawl and the Wikipedia pages from an archive maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation . For each collection, we identified the links on those pages and followed them to their destination to see what share of those links point to sites that are no longer accessible.

A third part of the study looks at how often individual posts on social media sites are deleted or otherwise removed from public view. We did this by collecting a large sample of public tweets on the social media platform X (then known as Twitter) in real time using the Twitter Streaming API. We then tracked the status of those tweets for a period of three months using the Twitter Search API to monitor how many were still publicly available. Refer to the report methodology for more details.

The internet is an unimaginably vast repository of modern life, with hundreds of billions of indexed webpages. But even as users across the world rely on the web to access books, images, news articles and other resources, this content sometimes disappears from view.

A new Pew Research Center analysis shows just how fleeting online content actually is:

• A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, as of October 2023. In most cases, this is because an individual page was deleted or removed on an otherwise functional website.

• For older content, this trend is even starker. Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023.

This “digital decay” occurs in many different online spaces. We examined the links that appear on government and news websites, as well as in the “References” section of Wikipedia pages as of spring 2023. This analysis found that:

• 23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link, as do 21% of webpages from government sites. News sites with a high level of site traffic and those with less are about equally likely to contain broken links. Local-level government webpages (those belonging to city governments) are especially likely to have broken links.
• 54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists.

To see how digital decay plays out on social media, we also collected a real-time sample of tweets during spring 2023 on the social media platform X (then known as Twitter) and followed them for three months. We found that:

• Nearly one-in-five tweets are no longer publicly visible on the site just months after being posted. In 60% of these cases, the account that originally posted the tweet was made private, suspended or deleted entirely. In the other 40%, the account holder deleted the individual tweet, but the account itself still existed.
• Certain types of tweets tend to go away more often than others. More than 40% of tweets written in Turkish or Arabic are no longer visible on the site within three months of being posted. And tweets from accounts with the default profile settings are especially likely to disappear from public view.

How this report defines inaccessible links and webpages

There are many ways of defining whether something on the internet that used to exist is now inaccessible to people trying to reach it today. For instance, “inaccessible” could mean that:

• The page no longer exists on its host server, or the host server itself no longer exists. Someone visiting this type of page would typically receive a variation on the “404 Not Found” server error instead of the content they were looking for.
• The page address exists but its content has been changed – sometimes dramatically – from what it was originally.
• The page exists but certain users – such as those with blindness or other visual impairments – might find it difficult or impossible to read.

For this report, we focused on the first of these: pages that no longer exist. The other definitions of accessibility are beyond the scope of this research.

Our approach is a straightforward way of measuring whether something online is accessible or not. But even so, there is some ambiguity.

First, there are dozens of status codes indicating a problem that a user might encounter when they try to access a page. Not all of them definitively indicate whether the page is permanently defunct or just temporarily unavailable. Second, for security reasons, many sites actively try to prevent the sort of automated data collection that we used to test our full list of links.

For these reasons, we used the most conservative estimate possible for deciding whether a site was actually accessible or not. We counted pages as inaccessible only if they returned one of nine error codes that definitively indicate that the page and/or its host server no longer exist or have become nonfunctional – regardless of how they are being accessed, and by whom. The full list of error codes that we included in our definition are in the methodology .

Here are some of the findings from our analysis of digital decay in various online spaces.

To conduct this part of our analysis, we collected a random sample of just under 1 million webpages from the archives of Common Crawl , an internet archive service that periodically collects snapshots of the internet as it exists at different points in time. We sampled pages collected by Common Crawl each year from 2013 through 2023 (approximately 90,000 pages per year) and checked to see if those pages still exist today.

We found that 25% of all the pages we collected from 2013 through 2023 were no longer accessible as of October 2023. This figure is the sum of two different types of broken pages: 16% of pages are individually inaccessible but come from an otherwise functional root-level domain; the other 9% are inaccessible because their entire root domain is no longer functional.

Not surprisingly, the older snapshots in our collection had the largest share of inaccessible links. Of the pages collected from the 2013 snapshot, 38% were no longer accessible in 2023. But even for pages collected in the 2021 snapshot, about one-in-five were no longer accessible just two years later.

We sampled around 500,000 pages from government websites using the Common Crawl March/April 2023 snapshot of the internet, including a mix of different levels of government (federal, state, local and others). We found every link on each page and followed a random selection of those links to their destination to see if the pages they refer to still exist.

Across the government websites we sampled, there were 42 million links. The vast majority of those links (86%) were internal, meaning they link to a different page on the same website. An explainer resource on the IRS website that links to other documents or forms on the IRS site would be an example of an internal link.

Around three-quarters of government webpages we sampled contained at least one on-page link. The typical (median) page contains 50 links, but many pages contain far more. A page in the 90th percentile contains 190 links, and a page in the 99th percentile (that is, the top 1% of pages by number of links) has 740 links.

Other facts about government webpage links:

• The vast majority go to secure HTTP pages (and have a URL starting with “https://”).
• 6% go to a static file, like a PDF document.
• 16% now redirect to a different URL than the one they originally pointed to.

When we followed these links, we found that 6% point to pages that are no longer accessible. Similar shares of internal and external links are no longer functional.

Overall, 21% of all the government webpages we examined contained at least one broken link. Across every level of government we looked at, there were broken links on at least 14% of pages; city government pages had the highest rates of broken links.

For this analysis, we sampled 500,000 pages from 2,063 websites classified as “News/Information” by the audience metrics firm comScore. The pages were collected from the Common Crawl March/April 2023 snapshot of the internet.

Across the news sites sampled, this collection contained more than 14 million links pointing to an outside website. 1 Some 94% of these pages contain at least one external-facing link. The median page contains 20 links, and pages in the top 10% by link count have 56 links.

Like government websites, the vast majority of these links go to secure HTTP pages (those with a URL beginning with “https://”). Around 12% of links on these news sites point to a static file, like a PDF document. And 32% of links on news sites redirected to a different URL than the one they originally pointed to – slightly less than the 39% of external links on government sites that redirect.

When we tracked these links to their destination, we found that 5% of all links on news site pages are no longer accessible. And 23% of all the pages we sampled contained at least one broken link.

Broken links are about as prevalent on the most-trafficked news websites as they are on the least-trafficked sites. Some 25% of pages on news websites in the top 20% by site traffic have at least one broken link. That is nearly identical to the 26% of sites in the bottom 20% by site traffic.

For this analysis, we collected a random sample of 50,000 English-language Wikipedia pages and examined the links in their “References” section. The vast majority of these pages (82%) contain at least one reference link – that is, one that directs the reader to a webpage other than Wikipedia itself.

In total, there are just over 1 million reference links across all the pages we collected. The typical page has four reference links.

The analysis indicates that 11% of all references linked on Wikipedia are no longer accessible. On about 2% of source pages containing reference links, every link on the page was broken or otherwise inaccessible, while another 53% of pages contained at least one broken link.

For this analysis, we collected nearly 5 million tweets posted from March 8 to April 27, 2023, on the social media platform X, which at the time was known as Twitter. We did this using Twitter’s Streaming API, collecting 3,000 public tweets every 30 minutes in real time. This provided us with a representative sample of all tweets posted on the platform during that period. We monitored those tweets until June 15, 2023, and checked each day to see if they were still available on the site or not.

At the end of the observation period, we found that 18% of the tweets from our initial collection window were no longer publicly visible on the site . In a majority of cases, this was because the account that originally posted the tweet was made private, suspended or deleted entirely. For the remaining tweets, the account that posted the tweet was still visible on the site, but the individual tweet had been deleted.

Which tweets tend to disappear?

Tweets were especially likely to be deleted or removed over the course of our collection period if they were:

• Written in certain languages. Nearly half of all the Turkish-language tweets we collected – and a slightly smaller share of those written in Arabic – were no longer available at the end of the tracking period.
• Posted by accounts using the site’s default profile settings. More than half of tweets from accounts using the default profile image were no longer available at the end of the tracking period, as were more than a third from accounts with a default bio field. Tweets from these accounts tend to disappear because the entire account has been deleted or made private, as opposed to the individual tweet being deleted.
• Posted by unverified accounts.

We also found that removed or deleted tweets tended to come from newer accounts with relatively few followers and modest activityon the site. On average, tweets that were no longer visible on the site were posted by accounts around eight months younger than those whose tweets stayed on the site.

And when we analyzed the types of tweets that were no longer available, we found that retweets, quote tweets and original tweets did not differ much from the overall average. But replies were relatively unlikely to be removed – just 12% of replies were inaccessible at the end of our monitoring period.

Most tweets that are removed from the site tend to disappear soon after being posted. In addition to looking at how many tweets from our collection were still available at the end of our tracking period, we conducted a survival analysis to see how long these tweets tended to remain available. We found that:

• 1% of tweets are removed within one hour
• 3% within a day
• 10% within a week
• 15% within a month

Put another way: Half of tweets that are eventually removed from the platform are unavailable within the first six days of being posted. And 90% of these tweets are unavailable within 46 days.

Tweets don’t always disappear forever, though. Some 6% of the tweets we collected disappeared and then became available again at a later point. This could be due to an account going private and then returning to public status, or to the account being suspended and later reinstated. Of those “reappeared” tweets, the vast majority (90%) were still accessible on Twitter at the end of the monitoring period.

• For our analysis of news sites, we did not collect or check the functionality of internal-facing on-page links – those that point to another page on the same root domain. ↩

Sign up for our weekly newsletter

Fresh data delivery Saturday mornings

Sign up for The Briefing

Weekly updates on the world of news & information

• Internet & Technology
• Online Search
• Public Knowledge

A quarter of U.S. teachers say AI tools do more harm than good in K-12 education

Teens and video games today, americans’ views of technology companies, 6 facts about americans and tiktok, many americans think generative ai programs should credit the sources they rely on, most popular, report materials.

1615 L St. NW, Suite 800 Washington, DC 20036 USA (+1) 202-419-4300 | Main (+1) 202-857-8562 | Fax (+1) 202-419-4372 |  Media Inquiries

Research Topics

• Email Newsletters

ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER  Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of  The Pew Charitable Trusts .

Copyright 2024 Pew Research Center

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts
• 09 May 2024

Cubic millimetre of brain mapped in spectacular detail

• Carissa Wong

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Rendering based on electron-microscope data, showing the positions of neurons in a fragment of the brain cortex. Neurons are coloured according to size. Credit: Google Research & Lichtman Lab (Harvard University). Renderings by D. Berger (Harvard University)

You have full access to this article via your institution.

Researchers have mapped a tiny piece of the human brain in astonishing detail. The resulting cell atlas, which was described today in Science 1 and is available online , reveals new patterns of connections between brain cells called neurons, as well as cells that wrap around themselves to form knots, and pairs of neurons that are almost mirror images of each other.

The 3D map covers a volume of about one cubic millimetre, one-millionth of a whole brain, and contains roughly 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses — the connections between neurons. It incorporates a colossal 1.4 petabytes of data. “It’s a little bit humbling,” says Viren Jain, a neuroscientist at Google in Mountain View, California, and a co-author of the paper. “How are we ever going to really come to terms with all this complexity?”

Slivers of brain

The brain fragment was taken from a 45-year-old woman when she underwent surgery to treat her epilepsy. It came from the cortex, a part of the brain involved in learning, problem-solving and processing sensory signals. The sample was immersed in preservatives and stained with heavy metals to make the cells easier to see. Neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues then cut the sample into around 5,000 slices — each just 34 nanometres thick — that could be imaged using electron microscopes.

Jain’s team then built artificial-intelligence models that were able to stitch the microscope images together to reconstruct the whole sample in 3D. “I remember this moment, going into the map and looking at one individual synapse from this woman’s brain, and then zooming out into these other millions of pixels,” says Jain. “It felt sort of spiritual.”

A single neuron (white) shown with 5,600 of the axons (blue) that connect to it. The synapses that make these connections are shown in green. Credit: Google Research & Lichtman Lab (Harvard University). Renderings by D. Berger (Harvard University)

When examining the model in detail, the researchers discovered unconventional neurons, including some that made up to 50 connections with each other. “In general, you would find a couple of connections at most between two neurons,” says Jain. Elsewhere, the model showed neurons with tendrils that formed knots around themselves. “Nobody had seen anything like this before,” Jain adds.

The team also found pairs of neurons that were near-perfect mirror images of each other. “We found two groups that would send their dendrites in two different directions, and sometimes there was a kind of mirror symmetry,” Jain says. It is unclear what role these features have in the brain.

Proofreaders needed

The map is so large that most of it has yet to be manually checked, and it could still contain errors created by the process of stitching so many images together. “Hundreds of cells have been ‘proofread’, but that’s obviously a few per cent of the 50,000 cells in there,” says Jain. He hopes that others will help to proofread parts of the map they are interested in. The team plans to produce similar maps of brain samples from other people — but a map of the entire brain is unlikely in the next few decades, he says.

“This paper is really the tour de force creation of a human cortex data set,” says Hongkui Zeng, director of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. The vast amount of data that has been made freely accessible will “allow the community to look deeper into the micro-circuitry in the human cortex”, she adds.

Gaining a deeper understanding of how the cortex works could offer clues about how to treat some psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases. “This map provides unprecedented details that can unveil new rules of neural connections and help to decipher the inner working of the human brain,” says Yongsoo Kim, a neuroscientist at Pennsylvania State University in Hershey.

Nature 629 , 739-740 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01387-9

Shapson-Coe, A. et al. Science 384 , eadk4858 (2024).

Article   Google Scholar  

Download references

Reprints and permissions

Related Articles

• Neuroscience

First ‘bilingual’ brain-reading device decodes Spanish and English words

News 21 MAY 24

Temporal multiplexing of perception and memory codes in IT cortex

Article 15 MAY 24

Volatile working memory representations crystallize with practice

Organoids merge to model the blood–brain barrier

Research Highlight 15 MAY 24

How does ChatGPT ‘think’? Psychology and neuroscience crack open AI large language models

News Feature 14 MAY 24

Postdoctoral Fellow

New Orleans, Louisiana

Tulane University School of Medicine

Postdoctoral Associate - Immunology

Houston, Texas (US)

Baylor College of Medicine (BCM)

Postdoctoral Associate

Vice president, nature communications portfolio.

This is an exciting opportunity to play a key leadership role in the market-leading journal Nature Portfolio and help drive its overall contribution.

New York City, New York (US), Berlin, or Heidelberg

Springer Nature Ltd

Senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow required to lead exciting projects in Cancer Cell Cycle Biology and Cancer Epigenetics.

Melbourne University, Melbourne (AU)

University of Melbourne & Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

Special Features

Vendor voice.

Personal Tech

Pew: Quarter of web pages vanished in past decade

Luckily we have the wayback machine.

The web is melting away like so many glaciers these days.

A report published by the Pew Research Center finds that digital decay is erasing online news, Twitter/X posts, and web links.

The Pew team - Athena Chapekis, Samuel Bestvater, Emma Remy, and Gonzalo Rivero - found that 25 percent of web pages that existed at some point between 2013 and October 2023 no longer function. As for older web pages that existed before 2013, 38 percent can no longer be accessed. As a point of comparison, about 8 percent of web pages from 2023 have disappeared.

The study, based on an analysis of web crawl data from Common Crawl , some 50,000 Wikipedia articles, and Twitter/X posts from last year, confirms longstanding concerns about the ephemeral nature of digital content.

"The internet is an unimaginably vast repository of modern life, with hundreds of billions of indexed webpages," Pew says. "But even as users across the world rely on the web to access books, images, news articles and other resources, this content sometimes disappears from view."

This has particular implications for news and government websites. A sample of half a million news pages from Common Crawl in March/April 2023 found that 23 percent had at least one broken link. For government websites – the same size sample during the same period – 21 percent had at least one broken link.

In a sample of 50,000 English-language Wikipedia pages, 82 percent included at least one reference link – a cited source – and 11 percent of these are no longer accessible. This makes fact checking much more difficult.

For the social media platform X, which was still referred to as Twitter during the March 8 to April 27, 2023 sample period, some 18 percent of 5 million tweets were no longer accessible by June 15 of that year. Some had been suspended, some had been removed, and some had been made private.

Among the portion of tweets that got removed, half vanished within the first six days of posting, and 90 percent were no longer available within 46 days.

Twitter posts, however, also get resurrected – about 6 percent resurface at some point, a phenomenon the researchers attribute to accounts that went private and then returned to public status, or suspended accounts that got reinstated.

• The internet – not as great as we all thought it was going to be, eh?
• How the Internet Archive faces potential destruction at the hands of Big Four publishers
• Internet Archive's 2046 Wayforward Machine says Google will cease to exist

Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine at the non-profit Internet Archive, told The Register : "This is why we do what we do."

The Wayback Machine crawls the web and archives copies of websites for posterity.

"We have identified and fixed more than 21 million broken URLs in Wikipedia articles, replacing them with archived versions of those web resources from The Wayback Machine," he explained.

Graham said the consequence of digital decay is the loss of our collective history. "When a society or people lose the ability to cite and compare and contrast, they lose the ability to do any kind of critical analysis or contextualize current events."

"We operate in the forever-now," he said. "We lose access to our memory. The ability to contextualize the events of our times depends upon having a record of our times." ®

• World Wide Web

Narrower topics

• Domain Name
• Federal government of the United States
• Government of the United Kingdom
• Insider Trading
• Search Engine
• Voice over IP

Broader topics

• Tim Berners-Lee

Send us news

Other stories you might like

Wiley shuts 19 scholarly journals amid ai paper mill problems, big brains divided over training ai with more ai: is model collapse inevitable, google i/o is google a/i as search biz goes all-in on ai, the next step up for high-impact identity authorization.

Critical infrastructure security will stay poor until everyone pulls together

Deepmind spinoff isomorphic claims alphafold 3 predicts bio-matter down to the dna, and it begins. openai mulls nsfw ai model output, ml suggests all that relaxing whale song might just be human-esque gossiping, semiconductor digital twins to sip $285m from america's chips act funding pool, some scientists can't stop using ai to write research papers, relax, google's drop in search market share in april was just an illusion, lights about to go out on us affordable connectivity program.

• Advertise with us

Our Websites

• The Next Platform
• Blocks and Files

Your Privacy

• Cookies Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Ts & Cs

Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024