Adaptive Website Design using Caching Algorithms Justin Brickell Inderjit S. Dhillon Dharmendra S. Modha Department of Computer Department of Computer IBM Almaden Research Sciences Sciences Center University of Texas at Austin University of Texas at Austin San Jose, CA, USA Austin, TX, USA Austin, TX, USA
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT Keywords Visitors enter a website through a variety of means, includ- Data Mining, Adaptive Web Sites, Caching, Pattern Mining, ing web searches, links from other sites, and personal book- Access Logs, Shortcutting marks. In some cases the first page loaded satisfies the vis- itor’s needs and no additional navigation is necessary. In other cases, however, the visitor is better served by content 1. INTRODUCTION located elsewhere on the site found by navigating links. If As websites increase in complexity, they run headfirst into the path between a user’s current location and his eventual a fundamental tradeoff: the more information that is avail- goal is circuitous, then the user may never reach that goal or able on the website, the more difficult it is for visitors to will have to exert considerable effort to reach it. By mining pinpoint the specific information that they are looking for. site access logs, we can draw conclusions of the form “users A well-designed website limits the impact of this tradeoff, so who load page p are likely to later load page q.” If there is that even if the amount of information is increased signifi- no direct link from p to q, then it would be advantageous cantly, locating that information becomes only marginally to provide one.