Recommending Web Pages Using Item-Based Collaborative Filtering Approaches

Predicting the next page a user wants to see in a large website has gained importance along the last decade due to the fact that the Web has become the main communication media between a wide set of entities and users. This is true in particular for institutional government and public organization websites, where for transparency reasons a lot of information has to be provided. The “long tail” phenomenon affects also this kind of websites and users need support for improving the effectiveness of their navigation. For this reason, complex models and approaches for recommending web pages that usually require to process personal user preferences have been proposed. In this paper, we propose three different approaches to leverage information embedded in the structure of web sites and their logs to improve the effectiveness of web page recommendation by considering the context of the users, i.e., their current sessions when surfing a specific web site. This proposal does not require either information about the personal preferences of the users to be stored and processed or complex structures to be created and maintained. So, it can be easily incorporated to current large websites to facilitate the users’ navigation experience. Experiments using a real-world website are described and analyzed to show the performance of the three approaches.