ABSTRACT
The Web is a dynamic information environment. Web content changes regularly and people revisit Web pages frequently. But the tools used to access the Web, including browsers and search engines, do little to explicitly support these dynamics. In this paper we present DiffIE, a browser plug-in that makes content change explicit in a simple and lightweight manner. DiffIE caches the pages a person visits and highlights how those pages have changed when the person returns to them. We describe how we built a stable, reliable, and usable system, including how we created compact, privacy-preserving page representations to support fast difference detection. Via a longitudinal user study, we explore how DiffIE changed the way people dealt with changing content. We find that much of its benefit came not from exposing expected change, but rather from drawing attention to unexpected change and helping people build a richer understanding of the Web content they frequent.
- Adar, E., M. Dontcheva, J. Fogarty, and D. S. Weld. Zoetrope: Interacting with the ephemeral Web. UIST '08, 2008, 239--248. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Adar, E., J. Teevan, and S. T. Dumais. Resonance on the Web: Web dynamics and revisitation patterns. CHI '09, 2009, 1381--1390. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Borodin, Y., J. P. Bigham, R. Raman and I. V. Ramakrishnan. What's new?--Making Web page updates accessible. ASSETS '08, 2008, 145--152. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Bharat, K. and A. Broder. Mirror, mirror on the Web: A study of host pairs with replicated content. WWW '99, 1999, 1579--1590. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Bucy, E., A. Lang, R. Potter, and M. Grabe. Formal features of cyberspace: Relationships between Web page complexity and site traffic. JASIS, 50(13):1246--1256, 1999. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Catledge, L. D. and J. E. Pitkow. Characterizing browsing strategies in the World-Wide Web. WWW '95, 1995, 1065--1073. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Cho, J. and H. Garcia-Molina. The evolution of the Web and implications for an incremental crawler. VLDB '00, 2000, 200--209. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Cockburn, A. and B. McKenzie. What do Web users do? An empirical analysis of Web use. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 54(6):903--922, 2001. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Douglis, F., A. Feldmann, and B. Krishnamurthy. Rate of change and other metrics: A live study of the World Wide Web. USENIX Symposium on Internet Technology and Systems, 1997. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Fetterly, D., M. Manasse, M. Najork, and Wiener, J. A large-scale study of the evolution of Web pages. WWW '03, 2003, 669--678. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Foster, A. and N. Ford. Serendipity and information seeking: An empirical study, Journal of Documentation, 59(3): 321--340, 2003.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Hupp, D. and R. Miller. Smart Bookmarks: Automatic retroactive macro recording on the Web. UIST '07, 2007, 81--90. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jatowt, A., Y. Kawai, H. Ohshima, and K. Tanaka. What can history tell us? Towards different models of interaction with document histories. HT '08, 2008, 5--14. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jones, R. and Fain, D. C. Query word deletion prediction. SIGIR '03, 2003, 435--436. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kellar, M., C. Watters, and K. M. Inkpen. An exploration of Web-based monitoring: Implications for design. CHI '07, 2007, 377--386. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Levering, R. and Cutler, M. The portrait of a common HTML Web page. DocEng '06, 2006, 198--204. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Liu, L., C. Pu, and W. Tang. WebCQ: Detecting and delivering information changes on the Web. CIKM '00, 2000, 512--519. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Liu, L., W. Tang, D. Buttler, and C. Pu, Information monitoring on the Web: A scalable solution. WWW '02, 2002, 263--304. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nadamoto, A. and K. Tanaka. A Comparative Web Browser (CWB) for browsing and comparing Web pages. WWW '03, 2003, 727--735. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ntoulas, A., Cho, J., and Olston, C. What's new on the Web? The evolution of the Web from a search engine perspective. WWW '04, 2004, 1--12. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Obendorf, Hartmut, H, Weinreich, E. Herder, and M. Mayer. Web page revisitation revisited: Implications of a long-term click-stream study of browser usage. CHI '07, 2007, 597--606. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Tauscher, L. and S. Greenberg. How people revisit Web pages: Empirical findings and implications for the design of history systems. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 47(1):97--137, 1997. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Teevan, J., E. Adar, R. Jones, and M. A. Potts. Information re-retrieval: Repeat queries in Yahoo's logs. SIGIR '07, 2007, 151--158. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Weinreich, H., Obendorf, H, Herder, E., and Mayer, M. Not quite the average: An empirical study of Web use. TWEB, 2(1), 2008. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Changing how people view changes on the web
Recommendations
The web changes everything: understanding the dynamics of web content
WSDM '09: Proceedings of the Second ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data MiningThe Web is a dynamic, ever changing collection of information. This paper explores changes in Web content by analyzing a crawl of 55,000 Web pages, selected to represent different user visitation patterns. Although change over long intervals has been ...
A longitudinal study of how highlighting web content change affects people's web interactions
CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsThe Web is constantly changing, but most tools used to access Web content deal only with what can be captured at a single instance in time. As a result, Web users may not have a good understanding of the changes that occur. In this paper we show that ...
Resonance on the web: web dynamics and revisitation patterns
CHI '09: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsThe Web is a dynamic, ever-changing collection of information accessed in a dynamic way. This paper explores the relationship between Web page content change (obtained from an hourly crawl of over 40K pages) and people's revisitation to those pages (...
Comments