Characterizing Web usage regularities with information foraging agents

Researchers have recently discovered several interesting, self-organized regularities from the World Wide Web, ranging from the structure and growth of the Web to the access patterns in Web surfing. What remains to be a great challenge in Web log mining is how to explain user behavior underlying observed Web usage regularities. In this paper, we will address the issue of how to characterize the strong regularities in Web surfing in terms of user navigation strategies, and present an information foraging agent-based approach to describing user behavior. By experimenting with the agent-based decision models of Web surfing, we aim to explain how some Web design factors as well as user cognitive factors may affect the overall behavioral patterns in Web usage.