research-article

Understanding web browsing behaviors through Weibull analysis of dwell time

Authors:

Susan DumaisAuthors Info & Claims

SIGIR '10: Proceedings of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval

Pages 379 - 386

https://doi.org/10.1145/1835449.1835513

Published: 19 July 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Dwell time on Web pages has been extensively used for various information retrieval tasks. However, some basic yet important questions have not been sufficiently addressed, eg, what distribution is appropriate to model the distribution of dwell times on a Web page, and furthermore, what the distribution tells us about the underlying browsing behaviors. In this paper, we draw an analogy between abandoning a page during Web browsing and a system failure in reliability analysis, and propose to model the dwell time using the Weibull distribution. Using this distribution provides better goodness-of-fit to real world data, and it uncovers some interesting patterns of user browsing behaviors not previously reported. For example, our analysis reveals that Web browsing in general exhibits a significant "negative aging" phenomenon, which means that some initial screening has to be passed before a page is examined in detail, giving rise to the browsing behavior that we call "screen-and-glean." In addition, we demonstrate that dwell time distributions can be reasonably predicted purely based on low-level page features, which broadens the possible applications of this study to situations where log data may be unavailable.

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Cited By

Jeong JCha Y(2024)A Study on the Security of Web Application using Enhanced Secure CookieThe Journal of Korean Institute of Information Technology10.14801/jkiit.2024.22.2.19522:2(195-204)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.14801/jkiit.2024.22.2.195
Alby T(2024)Bridging the Analytics Gap: Optimizing Content Performance using Actionable Knowledge DiscoveryProceedings of the 35th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media10.1145/3648188.3675121(185-192)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3648188.3675121
Dong GWu JDe Gortari Briseno JSingh AFeng JSarker ASehatbakhsh NSrivastava MOkoshi TKo JLiKamWa R(2024)RefreshChannels: Exploiting Dynamic Refresh Rate Switching for Mobile Device AttacksProceedings of the 22nd Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services10.1145/3643832.3661864(359-371)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643832.3661864
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Index Terms

Understanding web browsing behaviors through Weibull analysis of dwell time
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Artificial intelligence
    1. Philosophical/theoretical foundations of artificial intelligence
      1. Cognitive science
2. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)

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cover image ACM Conferences

SIGIR '10: Proceedings of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval

July 2010

944 pages

ISBN:9781450301534

DOI:10.1145/1835449

General Chairs:
Fabio Crestani
University of Lugano, CH
,
Stéphane Marchand-Maillet
University of Geneva, CH
,
Program Chairs:
Hsin-Hsi Chen
National Taiwan University, TW
,
Efthimis N. Efthimiadis
University of Washington, USA
,
Jacques Savoy
University of Neuchatel, CH

Copyright © 2010 ACM.

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Published: 19 July 2010

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SIGIR '10: The 33rd International ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in Information Retrieval

July 19 - 23, 2010

Geneva, Switzerland

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Overall Acceptance Rate 792 of 3,983 submissions, 20%

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https://doi.org/10.14801/jkiit.2024.22.2.195
Alby T(2024)Bridging the Analytics Gap: Optimizing Content Performance using Actionable Knowledge DiscoveryProceedings of the 35th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media10.1145/3648188.3675121(185-192)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3648188.3675121
Dong GWu JDe Gortari Briseno JSingh AFeng JSarker ASehatbakhsh NSrivastava MOkoshi TKo JLiKamWa R(2024)RefreshChannels: Exploiting Dynamic Refresh Rate Switching for Mobile Device AttacksProceedings of the 22nd Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services10.1145/3643832.3661864(359-371)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643832.3661864
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Zhang SJiang TKuang KFeng FYu JMa JZhao ZZhu JYang HChua TWu F(2023)SLED: Structure Learning based Denoising for RecommendationACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/361138542:2(1-31)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2023
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