Navigation characteristics of online social networks and search engines users

Authors:
Christopher W. Dunn;Minaxi Gupta;Alexandre Gerber;Oliver Spatscheck
Affiliations:
Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA;Indiana Univeristy, Bloomington, IN, USA;AT&T Labs-Research, Florham Park, NJ, USA;AT&T Labs-Research, Florham Park, NJ, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the 2012 ACM workshop on Workshop on online social networks
Year:
2012

Citing 7
Cited 1

Impact of search engines on page popularity

Proceedings of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web
Poking facebook: characterization of osn applications

Proceedings of the first workshop on Online social networks
Identifying user behavior in online social networks

Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Social Network Systems
Unveiling facebook: a measurement study of social network based applications

Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
Understanding online social network usage from a network perspective

Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference
Network level footprints of facebook applications

Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference
Towards understanding modern web traffic

Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference

Data Mining for User Modeling

International Journal of Organizational and Collective Intelligence

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Online social networks (OSNs) represent a significant portion of Web traffic today, comparable with search engines. Even though their primary purpose is different from that of search engines, OSNs are impacting how users navigate the Web and what types of websites they visit. This paper is motivated by the desire to understand the similarities and differences in the websites users visit through OSNs versus through search engines. Using Web traffic logs from 17,000 DSL subscribers of a Tier 1 ISP in the United States, we find that while OSN visitors are less likely to navigate to external websites, when they do, they spend more time at those websites compared to when search engine users visit external websites. Also, OSNs send their users to a narrower subset of the Web than search engines. While websites related to games and video are more commonly visited from OSNs, shopping and reference sites are common for search engines. Finally, OSNs send their visitors to less popular domains more often than search engines. Our findings can be useful to ISPs in network provisioning and traffic engineering.