Novelty and Social Search in the World Wide Web

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dynamical theory of web recommendations predicting user site visits, revealing a universal power law in user behavior confirmed by empirical data, and relates it to the rate of discovering new sites.

Contribution

It presents a novel dynamical model of social recommendations on the web and empirically validates the existence of a universal power law in user visit patterns.

Findings

Existence of a universal power law in user visits to web sites.

Empirical confirmation of the power law in real web user data.

Bounds on the rate at which users encounter new sites.

Abstract

The World Wide Web is fast becoming a source of information for a large part of the world's population. Because of its sheer size and complexity users often resort to recommendations from others to decide which sites to visit. We present a dynamical theory of recommendations which predicts site visits by users of the World Wide Web. We show that it leads to a universal power law for the number of users that visit given sites over periods of time, with an exponent related to the rate at which users discover new sites on their own. An extensive empirical study of user behavior in the Web that we conducted confirms the existence of this law of influence while yielding bounds on the rate of novelty encountered by users.