Web History Tools and Revisitation Support: A Survey of Existing Approaches and Directions (original) (raw)

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