Abstract
A better understanding of the fundamental mechanisms underlying complex human dynamics is of major interest in contemporary social research. Over the last few years, researchers have made huge strides towards this understanding, thanks especially to the increasing availability of datasets containing digital traces of many human activities. In this work, we investigate Web browsing trajectories using a human mobility approach based on approximately four years of browsing history data. Our findings strongly suggest that return visitation patterns in browsing behaviors and in human mobility exhibit very similar scaling properties. Moreover, we classify Web users as returners and explorers based on their on-line activities, and show that at a population level, the distribution of both profiles agrees with empirical observations in human mobility. Finally, we create a network representation of the most popular websites from the aggregated browsing trajectories and uncover many functional clusters related with different users’ activities.
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Notes
- 1.
The browsing history data is provided by the Web History Repository project http://webhistoryproject.blogspot.com/.
- 2.
- 3.
For more details on the structure of the browsing history, visit http://forensicswiki.org/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox_3_History_File_Format.
- 4.
Ekisto: an interactive visualization of online communities http://ekisto.sq.ro/.
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Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge the partial support from National Science Foundation (NSF) grant No. 1152306. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.
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Barbosa, H.S., de Lima Neto, F.B., Evsukoff, A., Menezes, R. (2016). Returners and Explorers Dichotomy in Web Browsing Behavior—A Human Mobility Approach. In: Cherifi, H., Gonçalves, B., Menezes, R., Sinatra, R. (eds) Complex Networks VII. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 644. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30569-1_13
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