The navigational power of Web browsers (original) (raw)
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International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming, 2002
We consider the navigation power of Web browsers, such as Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer or Opera. To this end, we formally introduce the notion of a navigational problem. We investigate various characteristics of such problems which make them hard to visit with small number of clicks.
Navigational complexity in web interactions
Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web - WWW '10, 2010
As the web grows in size, interfaces & interactions across websites diverge -for differentiation and arguably for a better user experience. However, this size & diversity is also a cognitive load for the user who has to learn a new user interface for every new website she visits. Several studies have confirmed the importance of well designed websites. In this paper, we propose a method for quantitative evaluation of the navigational complexity of user interactions on the web. Our approach of quantifying interaction complexity exploits the modeling of the web as a graph and uses the information theoretic definition of complexity. It enables us to measure the navigational complexity of web interaction in bits. Our approach is structural in nature and can be applied to both traditional paradigm of web interaction (browsing) and to emerging paradigms of web interaction like web widgets.
Automating Web navigation with the WebVCR
Computer Networks, 2000
Recent developments in Web technology such as the inclusion of scripting languages, frames, and the growth of dynamic content, have made the process of retrieving Web content more complicated, and sometimes tedious. For example, Web browsers do not provide a method for a user to bookmark a frame-based Web site once the user navigates within the initial frameset. Also, some sites, such as travel sites and online classifieds, require users to go through a sequence of steps and fill out a sequence of forms in order to access their data. Using the bookmark facilities implemented in all popular browsers, often it is not possible to create a shortcut to access such data, and these steps must be manually repeated every time the data is needed. However, hard-to-reach pages are often the best candidates for a shortcut, because significantly more effort is required to reach them than to reach a standard page with a well-defined URL.
Distributed computation of web queries using automata
Proceedings of the twenty-first ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systems - PODS '02, 2002
We introduce and investigate a distributed computation model for querying the Web. Web queries are computed by interacting automata running at different nodes in the Web. The automata which we are concerned with can be viewed as register automata equipped with an additional communication component. We identify conditions necessary and sufficient for systems of automata to compute Web queries, and investigate the computational power of such systems.
Off the beaten tracks: exploring three aspects of web navigation
Proceedings of the 15th …, 2006
This paper presents results of a long-term client-side Web usage study, updating previous studies that range in age from five to ten years. We focus on three aspects of Web navigation: changes in the distribution of navigation actions, speed of navigation and within-page navigation.
Automated browsing in AJAX websites
Data & Knowledge Engineering, 2011
Web automation applications are widely used for different purposes such as B2B integration, automated testing of web applications or technology and business watch. One crucial part in web automation applications is for them to easily generate and reproduce navigation sequences. This problem is specially complicated in the case of the new breed of AJAX-based websites. Although recently some tools have
ARCHIMIDES" An Intelligent Agent for Adaptive Personalized Navigation within a WEB Server
System Sciences, 1999. …, 1999
With the explosive growth of Internet and the volume of information published on it, the search and retrieval of desired information has become practically impossible, if its source is not known in advance. This is the reason why search engines have been emerged, aiming to relieve the user from the "lost in hyperspace" feeling and the information overload. Imagine, however, cases where the result of some query to a search engine contains hundreds of thousands of URLs (Uniform Resource Locators). With such a number of URLs, search engines become in practice inefficient, if we consider that the navigation through even a few decades of URLs is very tiring and time consuming. Thus, instead of trying to address the information overload problem with search engines and robots (spiders), we believe that each server should facilitate itself the retrieval of desired information, published on its own domain. In this paper we present "Archimides", an intelligent agent that aims to provide intelligent, adaptive and personalized navigation within a WEB server. Provided a subset of the set of keywords that characterize the server's contents, Archimides undertakes the task to perform an intelligent information retrieval and afterwards to construct a personalized version of the server in the form of an index to pages that present some interest to the user. This index does not resemble what search engines return as a result of some query; it could be probably regarded as a much sorter version of the WEB server, with links that are dynamically inserted or deleted according to the user's interests, preferences and behavior, providing Archimides with the feature of adaptivity. As a result the user navigates in a WEB server that may completely present interest to him or her, thus relieving the user from undesired information overload..
Online web navigation assistant
Vestnik Udmurtskogo Universiteta. Matematika. Mekhanika. Komp'yuternye Nauki
The problem of finding relevant data while searching the internet represents a big challenge for web users due to the enormous amounts of available information on the web. These difficulties are related to the well-known problem of information overload. In this work, we propose an online web assistant called OWNA. We developed a fully integrated framework for making recommendations in real-time based on web usage mining techniques. Our work starts with preparing raw data, then extracting useful information that helps build a knowledge base as well as assigns a specific weight for certain factors. The experiments show the advantages of the proposed model against alternative approaches.
A system architecture for intelligent browsing on the Web
Decision Support Systems, 2000
Compared with traditional business operations, WWW-based commerce has many advantages, such as timeliness, worldwide communication, hyper-links, and multimedia. However, there are also several browsing problems, such as getting lost, consuming a great amount of time browsing, and lack of customized interactive features. To acquire a competitive advantage over the countless number of Web sites, it is critical to solve these browsing problems. The purpose of this paper is to systematically review all browsing problems and then propose a system architecture for intelligent browsing on the Web. In this architecture, we present five kinds of browsing agents: recommendation agent, new-contents agent, search agent, customized agent, and personal-status agent. In order to support these agents, a user analyzer is provided to maintain the user profile by analyzing log files and CGI parameters. A site monitor is provided to maintain the site database by monitoring all changes to the site. We also developed a prototype to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system architecture. Finally, due to the time limitations, a laboratory experiment was carried out to verify the only value of the customized agent. The value of the agent was confirmed.