  Missing web pages, URIs that return the 404 "Page Not Found" error or the
HTTP response code 200 but dereference unexpected content, are ubiquitous in
today's browsing experience. We use Internet search engines to relocate such
missing pages and provide means that help automate the rediscovery process. We
propose querying web pages' titles against search engines. We investigate the
retrieval performance of titles and compare them to lexical signatures which
are derived from the pages' content. Since titles naturally represent the
content of a document they intuitively change over time. We measure the edit
distance between current titles and titles of copies of the same pages obtained
from the Internet Archive and display their evolution. We further investigate
the correlation between title changes and content modifications of a web page
over time. Lastly we provide a predictive model for the quality of any given
web page title in terms of its discovery performance. Our results show that
titles return more than 60% URIs top ranked and further relevant content
returned in the top 10 results. We show that titles decay slowly but are far
more stable than the pages' content. We further distill stop titles than can
help identify insufficiently performing search engine queries.
