- From: Paul Burchard <burchard@horizon.math.utah.edu>
- Date: Tue, 18 Apr 95 00:30:52 -0600
- To: brian@organic.com
- Cc: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www10.w3.org>
Brian Behlendorf <brian@organic.com> writes: > "Clickstreams" are the paths people take when they > traverse your site - many content providers would find it > useful to be able to detect common patterns or the > effectiveness of various user interfaces. > > So, I'd like to propose for discussion a new HTTP header > (hi Roy!) called "Session-ID". This would be optional, > of course, and it would change any time the browser is > restarted (or when the user wished). This is an excellent idea. With Referer logging, you can already produce a "Markov model" for your Web site, giving transition probabilities between pages. But it would be interesting to find out just how independent link choices really are; i.e., once a user gets to a page, how much does it matter where they came from? To the extent that it matters, the Markov model is inaccurate. > Given that more than one person can use a hostname (proxy > servers, etc), there's no reliable way to exactly identify > a unique person without implementing access control Yes, and the statistics of access intervals don't help. Intervals between requests from the same host seem to follow a combination of two very distinct exponential distributions whose decay rates differing by over an order of magnitude; presumably the long-term exponential represents intervals between user sessions through the same gateway host. But the problem with exponential distributions is that the maximum probability occurs at zero, no matter how long- or short-term they might be... -------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul Burchard <burchard@math.utah.edu> ``I'm still learning how to count backwards from infinity...'' --------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Tuesday, 18 April 1995 02:30:27 UTC