Internet use and Web traffic


 

navigation tree
Navigation tree of a single user

The World Wide Web, or simply the Web, is a network formed by pages and hyperlinks connecting them. It is at the basis of the way in which Internet works and of its success. Without the Web structure, finding information in Internet would be much more difficult. This network structure makes possible the concatenation of pages with similar contents, facilitating the life of both users and search engines. Apart from pages and hyperlinks, the other main ingredient of the Web, or of Internet in general, is the users. People or programs that navigate the network looking for concrete information or simply for amusement. All these ingredients conform a system that presents important challenges for understanding how it works but that offers enormous opportunities. One of the main challenges is to understand (and predict) the traffic patterns of the users. Which are the main forces behind the way we navigate? Are there statistical rules or laws in the way we behave online?

The goal of my research activity in this area is find answers to these previous questions. Such answers could have important applications in the real-world from search engines to crawlers. These are some of my recent publications (see the publication list for pdfs):

Back