REVISITATION PATTERNS IN WORLD WIDE WEB NAVIGATION
Date
1996-07-01
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Abstract
In this paper, we report user's revisitation patterns to World Wide Web
(WWW) pages, and use the results to lay an empirical foundation for the
design of history mechanisms in Web browsers. Through history, a user can
return quickly to a previously visited page, possibly reducing the cognitive
and physical overhead required to navigate to it from scratch. We analyzed
6 weeks of detailed usage data collected from 23 users of a commercial web
browser. We found that 58% of an individual's pages are revisits, and that
users continually add new Web pages into their repertoire of visited pages.
People tend to revisit pages just visited, access only a few pages
frequently, browse in very small clusters of related pages, and generate only
short sequences of repeated URL paths. We compared different history
mechanisms, and found that the stack based prediction method prevalent in
commercial browsers is inferior to the simpler approach of showing the last
few recently visited URLs with duplicates removed. Other predictive approaches
fare even better. These results suggest new approaches to managing
history in browsers.
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Computer Science