Measuring Web Page Revisitation in Tabbed Browsing

Browsing the web has been shown to be a highly recurrent activity. Aimed to optimize the browsing experience, extensive previous research has been carried out on users’ revisitation behavior. However, the conventional definition for revisitation, which only considers page loading activities by monitoring http requests initiated by the browser, largely underestimates users’ intended revisitation activities with tabbed browsers. Thus, we introduce a goal-oriented definition and a refined revisitation measurement based on page viewings in tabbed browsers. An empirical analysis of statistics taken from a client-side log study showed that although the overall revisitation rate remained relatively constant, tabbed browsing has introduced new behaviors warrant future investigations.