Beyond the usual suspects: context-aware revisitation support

Abstract

A considerable amount of our activities on the Web involves revisits to pages or sites. Reasons for revisiting include active monitoring of content, verification of information, regular use of online services, and reoccurring tasks. Browsers support for revisitation is mainly focused on frequently and recently visited pages. In this paper we present a dynamic browser toolbar that provides recommendations beyond these usual suspects, balancing diversity and relevance. The recommendation method used is a combination of ranking and propagation methods. Experimental outcomes show that this algorithm performs significantly better than the baseline method. Further experiments address the question whether it is more appropriate to recommend specific pages or rather (portal pages of) Web sites. We conducted two user studies with a dynamic toolbar that relies on our recommendation algorithm. In this context, the outcomes confirm that users appreciate and use the contextual recommendations provided by the toolbar.