Mobile Web Surfing is the SAME as Web Surfing

摘要

Several statistical laws have been proposed to help characterize strong regularities in the use and nature of the Web, including connectivity patterns and user surfing behavior. One of them, the Universal Law of Web Surfing, maintains that surfing patterns for users are quite regular, manifesting a preference for shorter surfing sessions over longer ones. Here, we assess whether these regularities extend to surfing on the mobile Web, specifically through Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) portals, where many aspects of the user environment are quite different from the conventional Web. We report our analysis of a large sample of mobile Web user data -3.7 million sessions involving 0.5 million users of a European portal—to determine whether the same laws apply to mobile Web surfing on WAP phones.