How people revisit web pagesIntroduction 1.
People use graphical browsers to navigate through links and to view pages.
These browsers typically provide history mechanisms that allow people to select and revisit pages they have viewed previously. If people revisit pages often, such history mechanisms can mitigate three problems people face when navigating the Web. First, they can help the user navigate through the vast amounts and poor structure of Web information by providing easy access to information they had visited previously. Second, they can decrease resource use by supplanting search engines for finding old pages, and by eliminating navigation through intermediate pages en-route to the destination. In particular, their designs are not based upon actual studies of how people revisit Web pages, and their actual use has been examined only superficially.