Surf*Mind*Musings

I’ve been excited about the new history and bookmarks system, Places, in Firefox 3 for a long while now. With the release impending, and some solid usage behind me, I can now look at some key metrics that the industry has been tracking in isolated research activities.

What percent of browser activity is spent on re-accessing information & sites versus consuming new experiences? A WWW’06 study by Harald Weinrich, et al. paper updated these stats, showing across studies 61% of pages visited were repeats in ‘94, 58% in ‘96, and only 45.6% in their 2006 study.

We know that 30% of searches are for revisiting. This is a lot of user experience and one that Firefox3 is addressing compellingly with the Awesome Bar using an algorithm that mimics human cognition using recency and frequency. The places a user might conceive of going are predicted by these two factors, as is much of cognition.

The nature of the effort executed in getting to the location is also predictive. This too is present in the Awesome Bar algorithm. From D.M.O The_Places_frecency_algorithm (more):

For the 10 most recent visits (where 10 is determined by places.frecency.numVisits):
.. Determine percentage bonus for type of visit (ie: the “transition type”):
…. 0 (places.frecency.embedVisitBonus)
…. 120 (places.frecency.linkVisitBonus)
…. 200 (places.frecency.typedVisitBonus)
…. 140 (places.frecency.bookmarkVisitBonus)
…. 0 (places.frecency.downloadVisitBonus)
…. 0 (places.frecency.permRedirectVisitBonus)
…. 0 (places.frecency.tempRedirectVisitBonus)
…. 0 (places.frecency.defaultVisitBonus)

It’s also very cool that you’re rewarded by using your bookmarks with serendipitious improvement of the location bar. In short, there’s a heck of a lot of personal magic in this dataset, as well as potential insights into how humans interact with the web.

I’ve been doing some data exploration on my placesdb powered by sqlite, now 3 months old, with SAGE (a sort of matlab * python). Here’s what I found my revisitation rate to be (sql):

So that’s 42% of my page views are revisits — given an increasing usage of FF3 as my primary browser over 3 months.

Now it’s entirely possible the selective pruning for history is making these numbers not quite right. Comments pointing to how the places db is pruned with time appreciated. This analysis should also be informed by a more intelligent filter of visit types. In any event, this is just the tip of the iceberg on both the research and feature fuel that can be garnered from the Places db and the rich API around it. Drop me a line or comment if you’d like my SAGE “workbooks”.

Mozilla.org is starting to seriously think about wide scale user research & data collection, with the simple logging tool Spectator returning to compatibility recently and the Mozilla Labs participant pool (aka Test Pilot) incubating.

Regarding large scale data, in the vein of ComScore metrics, Mozilla.org is very concerned about the trust user’s have placed in them. Perhaps it’s actually appropriate for the market to determine what works within the open ecosystem of Firefox. In any event, I expect lots of interesting add-on work utilizing places and increasing user research enabled, data driven innovation from Mozilla.