Evergreen or Ephemeral: Predicting Webpage Longevity Through Relevancy Features

With the rapid proliferation of user-generated content available on the Internet, one of the biggest challenges is determining the relevancy of the information shown. The content often comes in two camps: ephemeral or evergreen. Evergreen content such as recipes for carrot cake or intro to data structures frequently don’t change with time, whereas ephemeral content, such as celebrity hot or not trends or local high school sport scores easily become dated. Unlike apps that harp on ephemerality like Snapchat, the Internet doesn’t have the luxury of assigning expiration dates to content. Humans can easily distinguish one from the other, but machines have yet to do so.