Many online data sources are updated autonomously and independently. In this article, we make the case for estimating the change frequency of data to improve Web crawlers, Web caches and to help data mining. We first identify various scenarios, where different applications have different requirements on the accuracy of the estimated frequency. Then we develop several "frequency estimators" for the identified scenarios, showing analytically and experimentally how precise they are. In many cases, our proposed estimators predict change frequencies much more accurately and improve the effectiveness of applications. For example, a Web crawler could achieve 35% improvement in "freshness" simply by adopting our proposed estimator.