Getting deeper insights into the online browsing behavior of Web users has been a major research topic since the advent of the WWW. It provides useful information to optimize website design, Web browser design, search engines offerings, and online ad
vertisement. We argue that new technologies and new services continue to have significant effects on the way how people browse the Web. For example, listening to music clips on YouTube or to a radio station on Last.fm does not require users to sit in front of their computer. Social media and networking sites like Facebook or micro-blogging sites like Twitter have attracted new types of users that previously were less inclined to go online. These changes in how people browse the Web feature new characteristics which are not well understood so far. In this paper, we provide novel and unique insights by presenting first results of DOBBS, our long-term effort to create a comprehensive and representative dataset capturing online user behavior. We firstly investigate the concepts of parallel browsing and passive browsing, showing that browsing the Web is no longer a dedicated task for many users. Based on these results, we then analyze their impact on the calculation of a users dwell time -- i.e., the time the user spends on a webpage -- which has become an important metric to quantify the popularity of websites.
Location-based services gained much popularity through providing users with helpful information with respect to their current location. The search and recommendation of nearby locations or places, and the navigation to a specific location are some of
the most prominent location-based services. As a recent trend, virtual location-based services consider webpages or sites associated with a location as virtual locations that online users can visit in spite of not being physically present at the location. The presence of links between virtual locations and the corresponding physical locations (e.g., geo-location information of a restaurant linked to its website), allows for novel types of services and applications which constitute virtual location-based services (VLBS). The quality and potential benefits of such services largely depends on the existence of websites referring to physical locations. In this paper, we investigate the usefulness of linking virtual and physical locations. For this, we analyze the presence and distribution of virtual locations, i.e., websites referring to places, for two Irish cities. Using simulated tracks based on a user movement model, we investigate how mobile users move through the Web as virtual space. Our results show that virtual locations are omnipresent in urban areas, and that the situation that a user is close to even several such locations at any time is rather the normal case instead of the exception.
Despite the services of sophisticated search engines like Google, there are a number of interesting information sources which are useful but largely inaccessible to current Web users. These information sources are often ad-hoc, location-specific and
only useful for users over short periods of time, or relate to tacit knowledge of users or implicit knowledge in crowds. The solution presented in this paper addresses these problems by introducing an integrated concept of location and presence across the physical and virtual worlds enabling ad-hoc socializing of users interested in, or looking for similar information. While the definition of presence in the physical world is straightforward - through a spatial location and vicinity at a certain point in time - their definitions in the virtual world are neither obvious nor trivial. Based on a detailed analysis we provide an integrated spatial model spanning both worlds which enables us to define presence of users in a unified way. This integrated model allows us to enable ad-hoc socializing of users browsing the Web with users in the physical world specific to their joint information needs and allows us to unlock the untapped information sources mentioned above. We describe a proof-of-concept implementation of our model and provide an empirical analysis based on real-world experiments.
The investigation of the browsing behavior of users provides useful information to optimize web site design, web browser design, search engines offerings, and online advertisement. This has been a topic of active research since the Web started and a
large body of work exists. However, new online services as well as advances in Web and mobile technologies clearly changed the meaning behind browsing the Web and require a fresh look at the problem and research, specifically in respect to whether the used models are still appropriate. Platforms such as YouTube, Netflix or last.fm have started to replace the traditional media channels (cinema, television, radio) and media distribution formats (CD, DVD, Blu-ray). Social networks (e.g., Facebook) and platforms for browser games attracted whole new, particularly less tech-savvy audiences. Furthermore, advances in mobile technologies and devices made browsing on-the-move the norm and changed the user behavior as in the mobile case browsing is often being influenced by the users location and context in the physical world. Commonly used datasets, such as web server access logs or search engines transaction logs, are inherently not capable of capturing the browsing behavior of users in all these facets. DOBBS (DERI Online Behavior Study) is an effort to create such a dataset in a non-intrusive, completely anonymous and privacy-preserving way. To this end, DOBBS provides a browser add-on that users can install, which keeps track of their browsing behavior (e.g., how much time they spent on the Web, how long they stay on a website, how often they visit a website, how they use their browser, etc.). In this paper, we outline the motivation behind DOBBS, describe the add-on and captured data in detail, and present some first results to highlight the strengths of DOBBS.
