The creation of a complex web site is a thorny problem in user interface design. In this paper we explore the notion of adaptiveweb sites: sites that semi-automatically improve their organization and presentation by learning from visitor access patterns. It is easy to imagine and implementweb sites that offer shortcuts to popular pages. Are more sophisticated adaptiveweb sites feasible? What degree of automation can weachieve? To address the questions above, we describe the design space of adaptiveweb sites and consider a case study: the problem of synthesizing new index pages that facilitate navigation of a web site. We presentthePageGather algorithm, which automatically identifies candidate link sets to include in index pages based on user access logs. We demonstrate experimentally that PageGather outperforms the Apriori data mining algorithm on this task. In addition, we compare PageGather's link sets to pre-existing, human-authored index pages.

The creation of a complex web site is a thorny problem in user interface design. In IJCAI '97, we challenged the AI community to address this problem by creating adaptive web sites: sites that automatically improve their organization and presentation by mining visitor access data collected in Web server logs. In this paper weintroduce our own approach to this broad challenge. Specifically, we investigate the problem of index page synthesis --- the automatic creation of pages that facilitate a visitor's navigation of a Web site. First, we formalize this problem as a clustering problem and introduce a novel approach to clustering, which we call cluster mining: Instead of attempting to partition the entire data space into disjoint clusters, we search for a small number of cohesive (and possibly overlapping) clusters. Next, we present PageGather, a cluster mining algorithm that takes Web server logs as input and outputs the contents of candidate index pages. Finally, we show experime...

Abstract. Social search is an approach to Web search that attempts to offer communities of like-minded individuals more targeted search services, based on the search behaviour of their peers, bringing together ideas from Web search, social networking and personalization. In this paper we describe the I-SPY architecture for social search and present the results of a recent live-user evaluation that highlight the potential benefits of our approach in a realistic search setting. 1

The World Wide Web (WWW) tends to become the main medium supporting access to information and services to an expanding group of users. The increasing complexity of existing web applications and the volume of data offered often result in user disorientation. Adaptive interaction is proposed by many researchers as an effective means for tackling this problem. In this paper, we present and review existing approaches for developing adaptive web systems. Throughout the review, special emphasis is provided on techniques exploiting web usage data. The survey of methodologies is based on a twodimensional approach proposed here and used to distinguish different adaptive web systems.

This thesis contains a set of experiments that explore the creation and impact of social traces on digital objects. I hypothesize that layering a "history-of-use" on digital objects will positively enhance their use and build an awareness of distributed audiences. In an attempt to construct a symbolic language of audience participation, this project consists of several initial and one primary experiments which explore the parameters of communicating use-based meta-data in the background and on the object itself. PatinaMap is an enhanced image-map for the World Wide Web. Through this experiment, I explore several multivariate techniques for representing use-based meta-data. PatinaMap employs active visual filters, audio filters, remote usagetracking, intra-session paths, synchronous use representation and PatinaText in its attempt to provide users with the feeling of being part of a distributed audience and allow them to benefit from social use.

Search engines continue to struggle to provide everyday users with a service capable of delivering focussed results that are relevant to their information needs. Moreover, traditional search engines really only provide users with a starting point for their information search. That is, upon selecting a page from a search result list, the interaction between user and search engine is effectively over and the user must continue their search alone. In this paper, we argue that a comprehensive search service needs to provide the user with more help, both at the result list level and beyond, and we outline some recommendations for intelligent Web search support. We introduce the SearchGuide Web search support system and we describe how it fulfils the requirements for a search support system, providing evaluation results where applicable.

Topic management is the task of gathering, evaluating, organizing, and sharing a set of web sites for a specific topic. Current web tools do not provide adequate support for this task. We created and continue to develop the TopicShop system to address this need. TopicShop includes (1) a web crawler/analyzer that discovers relevant web sites and builds site profiles, and (2) user interfaces for information workspaces. We conducted an empirical pilot study comparing user performance with TopicShop vs. Yahoo™. Results from this study were used to improve the design of TopicShop. A number of key design changes were incorporated into a second version of TopicShop based on results and user comments of the pilot study including (1) the tasks of evaluation and organization are treated as integral instead of separable, (2) spatial organization is important to users and must be well supported in the interface, and (3) distinct user and global datasets help users deal with the large quantity of information available on the web. A full empirical study using the second iteration of TopicShop covered more areas of the World Wide Web and validated results from the pilot study. Across the two studies, TopicShop subjects found over 80 % more high-quality sites (where quality was determined by independent expert judgements) while browsing only 81 % as many sites and completing their task in 89 % of the time. The site

this article, we consider the basic design decisions that underlie any kind of adaptive web site, and consider several kinds of adaptive web sites by way of illustration. Next, to demonstrate the potential power of adaptive web sites, we consider the index page synthesis case study in more depth. We introduce the IndexFinder page synthesis system and describe its application to a live Web site. More detail about our algorithms and experiments can be found in [6].

The creation of a complex web site is a thorny problem in user interface design. In IJCAI '97, wechallenged the AI community to address this problem by creating adaptive web sites: sites that automatically improve their organization and presentation by mining visitor access data collected in Web server logs. In this paper weintroduce our own approachtothisbroadchallenge. Specifically, weinvestigate the problem of index page synthesis --- the automatic creation of pages that facilitate a visitor's navigation of a Web site. First, we formalize this problem as a clustering problem and introduce a novel approach to clustering, whichwe call cluster mining: Instead of attempting to partition the entire data space into disjoint clusters, we search forasmallnumber of cohesive (and possibly overlapping) clusters. Next, we presentPageGather, a cluster mining algorithm that takes Web server logs as input and outputs the contents of candidate index pages. Finally, weshow experime...

The creation of a complex web site is a thorny problem in user interface design. In this paper we explore the notion of adaptiveweb sites: sites that semi-automatically improve their organization and presentation by learning from visitor access patterns. It is easy to imagine and implementweb sites that offer shortcuts to popular pages. Are more sophisticated adaptiveweb sites feasible? What degree of automation can weachieve? To address the questions above, we describe the design space of adaptiveweb sites and consider a case study: the problem of synthesizing new index pages that facilitate navigation of a web site. We presentthePageGather algorithm, which automatically identifies candidate link sets to include in index pages based on user access logs. We demonstrate experimentally that PageGather outperforms the Apriori data mining algorithm on this task. In addition, we compare PageGather's link sets to pre-existing, human-authored index pages. Keywords: adaptive, cluste...