Analysis of internet users' interests based on windows GUI messages

Abstract

It is important to unobtrusively observe users' interactions on web browsers for the measurement of users' interest. Moreover, the observation should be performed on the client side in real time, because the contents of web pages are dynamically subject to change in the current Internet environment. In this paper, we suggest a simple method of inferring a user's interest for web contents by monitoring the amount of processed GUI messages while the user is reading a web page. We developed a software module that runs behind the Internet Explorer and monitors the number of processed GUI messages, the viewing time and the size of a web page. We found that the number of processed GUI messages, when properly normalized by the size of a web page, is close correlated with a user's interest for web contents.