Web page revisitation revisited (original) (raw)

Web page revisitation revisited: implications of a long-term click-stream study of browser usage

Proceedings of the …, 2007

This paper presents results of an extensive long-term clickstream study of Web browser usage. Focusing on character and challenges of page revisitation, previous findings from seven to thirteen years ago are updated. The term page revisit had to be differentiated, since the recurrence rate-the key measure for the share of page revisits-turns out to strongly depend on interpretation. We identify different types of revisitation that allow assessing the quality of current user support and developing concepts for new tools.

Characterizations of user Web revisit behavior

2005

In this article we update and extend on earlier long-term studies on user's page revisit behavior. Revisits are very common in web navigation, but not as predominant as reported in earlier studies. Backtracking is the most common type of page revisitation and is both used for finding new information and relocating information visited before. Search engines are mainly used for finding new information and users frequently backtrack to result pages. Visits to pages already visited in earlier sessions tend to occur in chunks, but it is not straightforward to create a list of most likely pages that will be revisited. We conclude with a short discussion on design implications for useradaptive revisitation support.

IMPROVING WEB PAGE REVISITATION: ANALYSIS, DESIGN, AND EVALUATION

In this paper, we distill several years of our research on understanding and improving how people return to their previously visited web pages. Our motivation is that web page revisitation is one of the most frequent actions in computer use, and consequently any interface improvements in this area-no matter how small-can have a very large effect. We report our findings across five categories of revisitation research: characterisations of user behaviour; system models of navigation and their impact on the user's understanding; interface methods for increasing the efficiency of the Back button; alternative system models for navigation; and alternative methods for presenting web navigation histories. The behaviour characterisation shows that revisitation is a dominant activity, with an average of four out of five page visits being to previously seen pages. It also shows that the Back button is heavily used, but poorly understood. Three interface strategies for improving web page revisitation are described. The first, a gesture-based mechanism for issuing the frequent Back and Forward commands, addresses low-level interface issues, and is shown to be both popular and effective. The second, a 'temporal' behaviour for the Back and Forward buttons, aims to overcome the problems associated with poor understanding of the current behaviour of Back. Although the results do not conclusively show advantages for the temporal behaviour of Back, they strongly suggest that revisitation can be improved by providing temporally ordered lists of previously visited pages. The third interface scheme investigates how next-generation browsers could integrate the current tools for revisitation into a single utility, and how simple visualisation methods can be used to aid users in identifying target pages displayed in miniature.

Patterns of revisitation in world wide web navigation

1996

In this paper, we report user's revisitation patterns to World Wide Web (WWW) pages, and use the results to lay an empirical foundation towards the design of history mechanisms in Web browsers. Through history, a user can return quickly to a previously visited page, ostensibly 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 presentation styles, and found that the stack-based prediction method prevalent in commercial browsers is poorer than the simpler approach of showing the last few recently visited URLs with duplicates removed. Other predictive approaches fare even better. It is clear that today's browsers are not as effective as they could be.

Large Scale Analysis of Web Revisitation Patterns

CHI 2008, 2008

Our work examines Web revisitation patterns. Everybody revisits Web pages, but their reasons for doing so can differ depending on the particular Web page, their topic of interest, and their intent. To characterize how people revisit Web content, we analyzed five weeks of Web interaction logs of over 612,000 users. We supplemented these findings by a survey intended to identify the intent behind the observed revisitation. Our analysis reveals four primary revisitation patterns, each with unique behavioral, content, and structural characteristics. Through our analysis we illustrate how understanding revisitation patterns can enable Web sites to provide improved navigation, Web browsers to predict users' destinations, and search engines to better support fast, fresh, and effective finding and re-finding.

How people revisit web pages: empirical findings and implications for the design of history systems

1997

We report on users' revisitation patterns to World Wide Web (web) 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 analysed 6 weeks of detailed usage data collected from 23 users of a wellknown web browser.

Web History Tools and Revisitation Support: A Survey of Existing Approaches and Directions

Foundations and Trends® in Human–Computer Interaction, 2007

Millions of web pages are visited, and revisited every day. On average, every second page loaded was already visited before by the same user-individual means for recurrence rates range between 20% and 72% (cf. p. 24). People revisit pages within a session or between parallel ones, they reuse web-based tools habitually, monitor specific content or resume interrupted sessions, and they want to re-find content after longer periods of time. Current history tools that support such revisits show unique and severe shortcomings. Often, revisits are cumbersome, more than necessary. This survey summarizes existing knowledge about revisitations on the web, and surveys the potential of graphic-based web history tools. A taxonomy of revisit-types distinguishes between short-, medium-, and long-term revisits, but also intra-and inter-session revisits. Assisted by a clear nomenclature this provides more clarity to the current discussion. The potential use of graphic-based tools is analyzed and discussed with respect to the found categories. The value of the current, mainly ix

Methods for web revisitation prediction: survey and experimentation

User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, 2015

More than 45% of the pages that we visit on the Web are pages that we have visited before. Browsers support revisits with various tools, including bookmarks, history views and URL auto-completion. However, these tools only support revisits to a small number of frequently and recently visited pages. Several browser plugins and extensions have been proposed to better support the long tail of less frequently visited pages, using recommendation and prediction techniques. In this article, we present a systematic overview of revisitation prediction techniques, distinguishing them into two main types and several subtypes. We also explain how the individual prediction techniques can be combined into comprehensive revisitation workflows that achieve higher accuracy. We investigate the performance of the most important workflows and provide a statistical analysis of the factors that affect their predictive accuracy. Further, we provide an upper bound for the accuracy of revisitation prediction using an 'oracle' that discards non-revisited pages.

Issues of page representation and organisation in web browser's revisitation tools

2007

Abstract Many commercial and research WWW browsers include a variety of graphical revisitation tools that let users return to previously seen pages. Examples include history lists, bookmarks and site maps. In this paper, we examine two fundamental design and usability issues that all graphical tools for revisitation must address. First, how can individual pages be represented to best support page identification?

Supporting revisitation with contextual suggestions

Proceeding of the 11th annual international ACM/IEEE joint conference on Digital libraries - JCDL '11, 2011

Web browsers provide only little support for users to revisit pages that they do not visit very often. We developed a browser toolbar that reminds users of already visited pages that are relevant to the page they are currently viewing. The toolbar makes use of a recommendation method that combines ranking methods with propagation methods. Our user evaluation shows that, on average, 22.7% of the revisits were triggered by the toolbar, thus accounting for a considerable change in the participants' revisitation routines. In this paper, we discuss the value of the recommendations and the implications derived from the evaluation.