An Empirical Analysis of Web Page Revisitation

There is a surprising lack of empirical research into user interaction with the web. This paper reports the results of an analysis of four months of logged data describing web use. The results update and extend earlier studies carried out in 1994 and 1995. We found that web page revisitation is a much more prevalent activity than previously reported (approximately 80% of pages have been previously visited by the user), that most pages are visited for a surprisingly short period of time, and that users maintain large (and possibly overwhelming) bookmark collections.