While LRSs do exist, they tend to be short. Figure 11 illustrates this phenomena. The plot shows the dramatic drop in LRS occurrences as the sequence length increases. The few longer URLs usually reference only one or two pages. As with locality sets, we noticed that this occurred when participants reloaded a page several times during an authoring session, navigated within a page using internal anchors, or submitted a form repeatedly.
Many paths show a recency effect.
That is, the next LRS often follows the previous one very closely. This suggests that the user was likely browsing the same site during the same session, took a slight diversion and then re-accessed the same sequence of pages. Some LRSs were generated by following Next and Previous hyperlinks that were embedded within a related set of Web pages. These sequences show more unique URLs as compared to many other types of sequences that involve revisiting some URLs. However, capturing such sequences in a history mechanism is also of little use since the user probably wants to visit each page, and an easy method to follow the path already exists through these embedded links.