Strong regularities in World Wide Web surfing

• Published in: Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Vol. 280; no. 5360; pp. 95 - 97
• Main Authors: Huberman, B.A, Pirolli, P.L.T, Pitkow, J.E, Lukose, R.M
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington, DC American Society for the Advancement of Science 03.04.1998; American Association for the Advancement of Science; The American Association for the Advancement of Science
• Subjects: Access to Information; Algorithms; Cumulative distribution functions; Exact sciences and technology; Gaussian distributions; Hyperlinks; Hypermedia; Hypertext; Information and communication sciences; Information processing and retrieval; Information retrieval. Man machine relationship; Information science. Documentation; information systems; Internet; Mathematical models; Observations; patterns; Probability; Research process. Evaluation; Sciences and techniques of general use; searching patterns; Spreading activation models; Statistical variance; Surfing; Topology; URLs; web searching; World Wide Web; Information retrieval; Zipf law; Internet; Hypertext; User behavior; World wide web
• ISSN: 0036-8075; 1095-9203
• DOI: 10.1126/science.280.5360.95

One of the most common modes of accessing information in the World Wide Web is surfing from one document to another along hyperlinks. Several large empirical studies have revealed common patterns of surfing behavior. A model that assumes that users make a sequence of decisions to proceed to another page, continuing as long as the value of the current page exceeds some threshold, yields the probability distribution for the number of pages that a user visits within a given Web site. This model was verified by comparing its predictions with detailed measurements of surfing patterns. The model also explains the observed Zipf-like distributions in page hits observed at Web sites.