Why we search: visualizing and predicting user behavior

  • Authors:
  • Eytan Adar;Daniel S. Weld;Brian N. Bershad;Steven S. Gribble

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Washington: CSE, Seattle, WA;University of Washington: CSE, Seattle, WA;University of Washington: CSE, Seattle, WA;University of Washington: CSE, Seattle, WA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

The aggregation and comparison of behavioral patterns on the WWW represent a tremendous opportunity for understanding past behaviors and predicting future behaviors. In this paper, we take a first step at achieving this goal. We present a large scale study correlating the behaviors of Internet users on multiple systems ranging in size from 27 million queries to 14 million blog posts to 20,000 news articles. We formalize a model for events in these time-varying datasets and study their correlation. We have created an interface for analyzing the datasets, which includes a novel visual artifact, the DTWRadar, for summarizing differences between time series. Using our tool we identify a number of behavioral properties that allow us to understand the predictive power of patterns of use.