User behavior on the web

In the process of researching ways to make Honeyclients more human-like in their browsing habits, I came across an excellent paper on user behavior. You can find it here. My interest was in finding statistics on how long pages are viewed by the user. The study enlisted 25 participants over a two-year period, and the study is the most extensive done to date. The results were published about one year ago.

The study found that users stay on a web page for an average of between 2 and 3 seconds. There are also statistics on the stay time given the number of words and number of links on the page. Other topics, such as download times, within-page navigation, and link activity areas, are also discussed. In all, it's a good source of data which I haven't found published anywhere else. Enjoy!

Our intent is to incorporate these finding into our Honeyclient behavior to make more human-like decisions when crawling the web.