2008/03/31 by Bruno Gonçalves, Bruno Goncalves, José J. Ramasco +1 · 2 voices · 6 citations
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis #Peer-to-Peer Network Technologies #cond-mat.stat-mech #cs.CY #cs.HC #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.78.026123
published as Physical Review E 78, 026123 (2008) · 7 pages, 8 figures
arxiv created 2008/05/21 · openalex publication_date 2008/08/26 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The increasing ubiquity of Internet access and the frequency with which people interact with it raise the possibility of using the Web to better observe, understand, and monitor several aspects of human social behavior. Web sites with large numbers of frequently returning users are ideal for this task. If these sites belong to companies or universities, their usage patterns can furnish information about the working habits of entire populations. In this work, we analyze the properly anonymized logs detailing the access history to Emory University's Web site. Emory is a medium-sized university located in Atlanta, Georgia. We find interesting structure in the activity patterns of the domain and study in a systematic way the main forces behind the dynamics of the traffic. In particular, we find that linear preferential linking, priority-based queuing, and the decay of interest for the contents of the pages are the essential ingredients to understand the way users navigate the Web.