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Many recent news reports have claimed that content generated by large language models (LLMs) is taking over the web. However, these claims are typically not based on a representative sample of the web and the methodology underlying them is…
Journalistic fact-checking, as well as social or economic research, require analyzing high-quality statistics datasets (SDs, in short). However, retrieving SD corpora at scale may be hard, inefficient, or impossible, depending on how they…
Getting deeper insights into the online browsing behavior of Web users has been a major research topic since the advent of the WWW. It provides useful information to optimize website design, Web browser design, search engines offerings, and…
This study takes a close look at mobile web performance. The two main parameters determining web page load time are the network speed and the computing power of the end-user device. Based on data from real users, this paper quantifies the…
While JavaScript established itself as a cornerstone of the modern web, it also constitutes a major tracking and security vector, thus raising critical privacy and security concerns. In this context, some browser extensions propose to…
Websites use third-party ads and tracking services to deliver targeted ads and collect information about users that visit them. These services put users' privacy at risk, and that is why users' demand for blocking these services is growing.…
Nowadays, more and more people use the Web as their primary source of up-to-date information. In this context, fast crawling and indexing of newly created Web pages has become crucial for search engines, especially because user traffic to a…
Modern web browsers are incredibly complex, with millions of lines of code and over one thousand JavaScript functions and properties available to website authors. This work investigates how these browser features are used on the modern,…
Major search engines deploy personalized Web results to enhance users' experience, by showing them data supposed to be relevant to their interests. Even if this process may bring benefits to users while browsing, it also raises concerns on…
Tremendous effort has gone into the ongoing battle to make webpages load faster. This effort has culminated in new protocols (QUIC, SPDY, and HTTP/2) as well as novel content delivery mechanisms. In addition, companies like Google and…
The annual consumption of web-based resources is increasing at a very fast rate, mainly due to an increase in affordability and accessibility of the internet. Many are relying on the web to get diverse perspectives, but at the same time, it…
A core problem in the development and maintenance of crowd-sourced filter lists is that their maintainers cannot confidently predict whether (and where) a new filter list rule will break websites. This is a result of enormity of the Web,…
Accurately analyzing and modeling online browsing behavior play a key role in understanding users and technology interactions. In this work, we design and conduct a user study to collect browsing data from 31 participants continuously for…
Does more information elicit users compliance and engagement, or the other way around? This paper explores the relationship between content strategy and user experience (UX). Specifically, we examine how the amount of information provided…
Browsing privacy solutions face an uphill battle to deployment. Many operate counter to the economic objectives of popular online services (e.g., by completely blocking ads) and do not provide enough incentive for users who may be subject…
With the popularity of mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets, users prefer visiting Web pages on mobile devices. Meanwhile, HTTP(S) plays as the major protocol to deliver Web contents, and has served the Web well for more than 15…
Performance in web applications is a key aspect of user experience and system scalability. Among the different techniques used to improve web application performance, caching has been widely used. While caching has been widely explored in…
Content-centric networking (CCN) introduces a paradigm shift from a host centric to an information centric communication model for future Internet architectures. It supports the retrieval of a particular content regardless of the physical…
Adblocking tools like Adblock Plus continue to rise in popularity, potentially threatening the dynamics of advertising revenue streams. In response, a number of publishers have ramped up efforts to develop and deploy mechanisms for…
Web crawlers visit internet applications, collect data, and learn about new web pages from visited pages. Web crawlers have a long and interesting history. Early web crawlers collected statistics about the web. In addition to collecting…