Papers for

web personalization teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

User behavior strongly predicts web browsing identity and next sites

Behavioral Fingerprinting and Navigation Prediction in Web Browsing

Abstract: Web browsing often appears ephemeral: users visit a few websites, complete a task, and move on. However, even short fragments of browsing activity can contain rich and structured behavioral signals. In this work, we conduct a comparative empirical study of two complementary behavioral inference tasks: session-level user identification and next-domain prediction. Both tasks are derived from the same cleaned event stream and evaluated on large-scale anonymous browsing traces, with sessionization and splitting adapted to the temporal requirements of each task. For user identification, we evaluate classical and neural models operating on session-level behavioral and domain features. For next-domain prediction, we combine graph-based modeling with Large Language Models (LLMs). Experimental results show that short browsing sessions are highly identifiable, while future navigation actions are highly predictable from long-term interaction structure combined with recent behavioral context. Furthermore, LLM-derived semantic features yield only marginal gains over purely structural and sequential models, indicating that repeated interaction patterns remain the dominant predictive signal in the evaluated web-browsing setup. These findings highlight the extent to which interaction history substantially contributes to both user identifiability and navigation predictability in browsing traces.

Wed 16 SeptMachine Learning
The gist
Web browsing might seem random and short, but even small fragments of activity carry strong clues about who is browsing and what they will do next. The authors study how well one can tell users apart from their browsing sessions and predict their next website. They find that users are highly identifiable from short browsing patterns and that future navigation can be forecast well using long-term interaction data combined with recent actions. Using large language models adds little on top of simpler sequence and structure models, showing that repeated user habits dominate prediction.
Open → 2609.18273v1