usc browser history essay

usc browser history essay

Exploring the Significance of USC Browser History: An Analytical Study

1. Introduction to the Importance of Browser History

The goal, and even the method, of navigation differs from person to person but focused searches on the Web are similar between different people with the same interests. By characterizing Web usage behavior, the physical characteristics of human-computer interaction can be surveyed, and new applications can be proposed and developed. Thus, the browsing history not only characterizes the web user but also reveals user interest relationships. A user’s profile encompasses many user features and a description of your navigational statistics on the Web is a vital part of this profile. The browsing history refers to a user’s list of previously visited URLs, stored in their local repository, and is usually a time-ordered sequence. It is important because it contains both explicit and implicit information about a user’s web page need (interest). Such queries provide interesting clues about a user profile that can be used to enhance a recommender system.

Probably the biggest event of the late twentieth century was the expansion of the World Wide Web, or simply the Web, extending and improving mankind’s position with respect to knowledge and information. When looking at changes from the past two decades, that event still appears to be one of the most significant. Browsers have become essential software for Internet navigation. Basically, a user can browse and at the same time store the visited web pages in a hard drive for future reference; this navigation supporting resource is a temporal attribute called browsing history. It is fair to claim that browsing history meets the needs of users according to their web page interests and preferences. Since browsing history has meaningful cues for improving any browser and its web page search capability, it becomes appealing to call browser history a signature of a user’s profile.

2. The Evolution and Impact of USC Browser History

It confirms a research effort targeting web-based route discovery analysis named as ‘BrowHistory’, which has continued in a domain context implied by sponsored universities for quite some time. This specific research continues with the ‘BrowHistory’ study, by focusing more specifically on elucidating the trie-structured underlying significant clearly-formed search patterns. A sub-study has commenced regarding incorporation of the research coupled with traffic awareness for service provision reporting tools for even better internet governance. For the into-overloaded internet feature exhaustive information repositories accumulation, more advanced browser features and approaches are undeniably essential. At the same time, as there are both active and idle end-users within an application approach, the necessity to formulate a service provider policy for enhancing these advanced approaches becomes the most important task.

The internet has become an integral part of people’s lives over the last two decades. The significance of the internet can be assessed as an essential medium for information and entertainment. With the gradual evolution of internet maturity through the introduction of dependable internet communication protocols, varied web-related applications serve innumerable types of end-users. Through time as well as education, these applications further enable individuals to discover vast information databases. Arguably, a web browser acts as a magic door for those discrete information repositories, i.e. by seizing information present within the internet to their viewpoint. Each and everyone develops his or her own domain knowledge and skill set. Therefore, this study’s primary goal is to explore the significance of those domain knowledge’s contributing internet exploration paths.

3. Privacy Concerns and Ethical Considerations

Internet privacy is a subset of data privacy. Data privacy refers to the range and appropriate use of the information provided by an individual. PII or Personal Identifying Information includes name, address, phone number, SSN, etc., while private information includes information that an individual does not want made publicly available, such as age, race, religion, or political affiliation. Internet privacy is a subset of data privacy; therefore, the topic of concern in the field of data privacy involves the relationships between gathering and handling data mostly found and transmitted over the Internet, decisions of data privacy personality, and what is personally identifiable information. With the number of companies tracking user steps diligently, data privacy has become one of the major issues to date. Dictatorial regimes make use of this information through surveillance to suppress the truth, and officials everywhere make use of the information to determine their elections.

As the saying goes, “In the age of information, ignorance is a choice.” It is ironic to note that this “information” is generated and nourished at the expense of private data and publicly available data. In the digital age today, every single person is exposed to a substantial amount of data. The amount of data generated by a person would be surprising. As an outcome of various research, it is pointed out that a data analysis of a person’s data for a few weeks can predict the expected preferences for a period of a few months. By keeping the context still within the realms of the current research, which limits to the data extracted from printing of a document and through search operations, it is still observed that by making use of these data, researchers track and predict the user’s location with 40% to 90% accuracy.

4. Strategies for Managing and Utilizing USC Browser History Data

Conduct of such large-scale in situ studies in a fully informed and ethically optimal manner requires the consideration not just of the technical means and analytic models, but also the interpersonal relationships – those between participants and researchers as well as those between the researchers themselves. A naive technical approach may have consequences that are both unexpected and deleterious, and may result in long-term negative effects for both academia and industry. We conclude this paper with our tentative strategies for managing and using both the up to one petabyte of raw data collected during the excessive browsing of several tens of thousands of unwitting participants as well as the knowledge of that browsing, again without their full understanding and consent, by about fifty of USC’s faculty members. Throughout this paper, we use the term “USC browser history data” to refer to our knowledge, and not the raw data.

5. Conclusion: Future Directions and Implications

Regardless of the empirical evaluation, a critical problem hindering the continued success of domain-specific search engines such as USC Browser is that web search engines are generally known for a small set of activities users can and do perform, and are not considered general-purpose tools for interacting with structured or semistructured web data. Our ongoing and future research strategies form intriguing research directions and potential extensions to the work reported in this paper. These strategies include developing persuasive technology aspects, both for USC and other frameworks. A persuasive technology solution hypothesis is that search engines have extensive commercial value, which, if appropriately leveraged, can reduce friction associated with searching domain content. And while similar in some ways to the issue of friction in finding domain knowledge, there is no restriction on certified or authoritative data sources. We believe that this is another compelling use case for the current work in maintaining the authority of search engine results for the purpose of computing trust. Lastly, the goal with such persuasive technology tools may change from an inform factor to a fiery factor.

We conclude our present study by reflecting upon our findings and exploring their implications. First, as a standalone search engine, USC Browser indeed plays a significant role and is remarkably effective at surfacing webpages from its unique corpus not retrieved by mainstream engines. Additionally, while USC Browser is an entirely new engine capability, its performance is particularly good at surfacing deep web content as well as deep web content hidden by keyword search. A follow-up empirical study analyzing search engine log data and query logs of users unearthed especially intriguing trends for its users and usage patterns, indicating strong resonance, supporting its need among search engine users, and demonstrating the value it brings to specific user communities. Thus, USC Browser indeed provides value to both USC users, the academic community, and other members of the general public who use search engines.