Web User Session Reconstruction with Back Button Browsing

Abstract. A web user session, the sequence of pages a user visits at a web site, is valuable data used in many e-business applications but privacy concerns often limit their direct retrieval. A web server log file provides an approximate way of constucting user sessions without privacy concerns. It is only approximate because the same IP address as recorded in the web log often contains the requests of several concurrent users without each user being uniquely identified. Additionally, a user’s activation of the back and forward browser button is often not recorded in the web log because, in most cases, the browser retrieves the page from its own cache. We present an integer program to construct user sessions (sessionization) from web log data that includes the possible use of the back button. We present sessionization results on web log data from an academic web site and compare sessions constructed with and without the option of sessions with the back button.