What are people looking for in your web page?

Abstract

Web server log analyses usually analyze the pattern of the access. We believe that it is also very important to understand the goal of the access. In this paper, we propose to combine the log analysis with content analysis to identify information goals on individual accessed pages. We analyze the web server log to extract information goals on entry pages from anchor texts and query terms, and propagate them along users' access paths to other linked pages. The experiment shows that our approach could find popular terms on web pages, temporal changes in these terms could reflect users' interest shifts, and unexpected terms could sometimes indicate a design problem. Springer-Verlag 2004.