Browsing by Author "Liu, Binzhang"

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  • Characterizing World Wide Web Queries
    Abdulla, Ghaleb; Liu, Binzhang; Saad, Rani A.; Fox, Edward A. (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1997-02-01)
    Locating information on the WWW is a major activity for users, and Web Information Retrieval Systems (IRS) are becoming more important to support their endeavors. In this paper we characterize queries performed by Web users to such systems and give distributions for accesses to different Web IRS. We characterize clients' accesses, queries and user sessions. Our purpose is to reduce network and bandwidth by identifying ways to optimize interactions with the Web. We characterize clients' sessions by a sequence of Browsing, Searching, and Next steps, and demonstrate that more search steps correlate with a reduction in the number of bytes transferred.
  • Web Response Time and Proxy Caching
    Liu, Binzhang; Abdulla, Ghaleb; Johnson, Tommy; Fox, Edward A. (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1998-03-01)
    It is critical to understand WWW latency in order to design better HTTP protocols. In this paper we characterize Web response time and examine effects of proxy caching on response time. We show that at least a quarter of the total elapsed time is spent in setting up TCP connections. We also characterize the effect of a user's network bandwidth on response time. Average connection time from a client via a 33.6 K modem is two times longer than that from a client via switched Ethernet. Contrary to the typical thought about Web proxy caching, this study finds that a single stand alone proxy cache does not always reduce response time. Implications of these results to the HTTP-NG protocol and Web application design also are discussed in the paper.