Web Usage Mining

Abstract

In recent days, Internet technology has provided a lot of services for sharing and distributing information across the world. Among all the services, World Wide Web (WWW) plays a significant role. The slow retrieval of Web pages may lessen the interest of users from accessing them. To deal with this problem, Web caching and Web pre-fetching are the two techniques used. Web proxy caching plays a key role in improving Web performance by keeping Web objects that are likely to be used in the near future in the proxy server which is closer to the end user. It helps in reducing user perceived latency, network bandwidth utilization, and alleviating loads on the Web servers. Thus, it improves the efficiency and scalability of Web based system. This chapter gives an overview of Web usage mining and its application on Web and discusses various approaches for improving the performance of Web.