Analysis of web structure using generalized navigational routes

Online search engines play an increasingly pervasive role in navigating users to the web pages of their interest. Given the ambitions of any major search engine to be a “one-stop service" for all user needs, it is important to understand the ways users find content on the Web. The proposed way of generalized description of navigational patterns used to learn the ways users approach different pages on the Web depending on the characteristics of these pages. We conducted a comprehensive large-scale study of navigational profiles of different web pages and found that the Web consists of several typical non-overlapping clusters formed by pages of similar ranges of incoming traffic. These clusters can be characterized by the functionality and the purpose of their pages. This approach is useful for finding user tasks that can be supported by search systems but not currently covered by them.