Abstract

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.

Keywords

HyperlinkZipf's lawComputer scienceWorld Wide WebWeb pageWeb navigationPage viewWeb siteInformation retrievalSequence (biology)Static web pageThe InternetBiologyMathematicsStatistics

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Publication Info

Year
1998
Type
article
Volume
280
Issue
5360
Pages
95-97
Citations
758
Access
Closed

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Bernardo A. Huberman, Peter Pirolli, James E. Pitkow et al. (1998). Strong Regularities in World Wide Web Surfing. Science , 280 (5360) , 95-97. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.280.5360.95

Identifiers

DOI
10.1126/science.280.5360.95
PMID
9525865

Data Quality

Data completeness: 81%