Improving semantic consistency of web sites by quantifying user intent

Abstract

The design and organization of a website reflects the authors intent. Since user perception and understanding of websites may differ from the authors, we propose a means to identify and quantify this difference in perception. In our approach we extract perceived semantic focus by analyzing user behavior in conjunction with keyword similarity. By combining usage and content data we identify user groups with regard to the subject of the pages they visited. Our real world data shows that these user groups are nicely distinguishable by their content focus. By introducing a distance measure of keyword coincidence between web pages and user groups, we can identify pages of similar perceived interest. A discrepancy between perceived distance and link distance in the web graph indicates an inconsistency in the web site's design. Determining usage similarity allows the web site author to optimize the content to the users needs. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.