Re:The mounting cost of stale ad blocking rules (2018)
by seoaeu on Sunday June 13, 2021 @06:00PM
(#27496945)
Yeah, there are likely statistical methods you could use to estimate the number of stale rules, but "try the top 5000 and ~0.5% of the rest" isn't that
Re:The mounting cost of stale ad blocking rules (2018)
by IgorPartola on Sunday June 13, 2021 @11:09PM
(#27498876)
Also 8% of the rules could block like 99% of web traffic. But also notice the part where they went to 1m random sites too. That would be a sample from the rest of the Internet.
1. Use Selenium and the DevTools Protocol to record every URL requested when rendering and executing a website.
2. Add additional automation to randomly select three distinct same-domain URLs from anchor tags on a page.
3. Used the above automation to visit the homepage of each site, and a maximum of three child pages, and recorded all URLs requested for images, script files, and other web resources.
4. Determine which of those URLs would be blocked by the version of EasyList fetched on that day, using Brave's optimized ad-block implementation.
...
We found that the vast majority of EasyList rules are not used when browsing popular websites; 3,268 of 39,198 (~8%) of network and exception rules were used during our crawls (these measurements exclude element rules)."
That doesn't mean that EasyList is not useful for browsing the rest of the internet.