How Web 1.0 Fails: The Mismatch Between Hyperlinks and Clickstreams
This reveals a fundamental flaw in Web 1.0 design for users and webmasters, showing it is incremental by building on existing web navigation theories.
The study tackled the mismatch between hyperlink navigation designed by webmasters and actual user clickstreams, finding that users prefer navigating within language-based groups due to 'preferential navigation' driven by local search engines.
The core of the Web is a hyperlink navigation system collaboratively set up by webmasters to help users find desired websites. But does this system really work as expected? We show that the answer seems to be negative: there is a substantial mismatch between hyperlinks and the pathways that users actually take. A closer look at empirical surfing activities reveals the reason of the mismatch: webmasters try to build a global virtual world without geographical or cultural boundaries, but users in fact prefer to navigate within more fragmented, language-based groups of websites. We call this type of behavior "preferential navigation" and find that it is driven by "local" search engines.