Towards adaptive Web sites: conceptual framework and case study

The creation of a complex Web site is a thorny problem in user interface de sign. In this paper we explore the notion of adaptive Web sites: sites that semi-automatically improve their organization and presentation by learning from visitor access patterns. It is easy to imagine and implement Web site s that offer shortcuts to popular pages. Are more sophisticated adaptive We b sites feasible? What degree of automation can we achieve? To address the questions above, we describe the design space of adaptive We b sites and consider a case study: the problem of synthesizing new index pa ges that facilitate navigation of a Web site. We present the PageGather alg orithm, which automatically identifies candidate link sets to include in in dex pages based on user access logs. We demonstrate experimentally that Pag eGather outperforms the Apriori data mining algorithm on this task. In addi tion, we compare PageGather's link sets to pre-existing, human-authored ind ex pages. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.