Remembering what we like: Toward an agent-based model of Web traffic
author: Mark R. Meiss, Indiana University
author: Jose J. Ramasco, Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation
Description
Analysis of aggregate Web traffic has shown that PageRank
is a poor model of how people actually navigate the Web.
Using the empirical traffic patterns generated by a thousand
users over the course of two months, we characterize
the properties of Web traffic that cannot be reproduced by
Markovian models, in which destinations are independent
of past decisions. In particular, we show that the diversity
of sites visited by individual users is smaller and more
broadly distributed than predicted by the PageRank model;
that link traffic is more broadly distributed than predicted;
and that the time between consecutive visits to the same
site by a user is less broadly distributed than predicted. To
account for these discrepancies, we introduce a more realistic
navigation model in which agents maintain individual
lists of bookmarks that are used as teleportation targets.
The model can also account for branching, a traffic property
caused by browser features such as tabs and the back button.
The model reproduces aggregate traffic patterns such as
site popularity, while also generating more accurate predictions
of diversity, link traffic, and return time distributions.
This model for the first time allows us to capture the extreme
heterogeneity of aggregate traffic measurements while
explaining the more narrowly focused browsing patterns of
individual users.
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