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Cat and mouse: content delivery tradeoffs in web access

Published: 23 May 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Web pages include extraneous material that may be viewed as undesirable by a user. Increasingly many Web sites also require users to register to access either all or portions of the site. Such tension between content owners and users has resulted in a "cat and mouse" game between content provided and how users access it.We carried out a measurement-based study to understand the nature of extraneous content and its impact on performance as perceived by users. We characterize how this content is distributed and the effectiveness of blocking mechanisms to stop it as well as countermeasures taken by content owners to negate such mechanisms. We also examine sites that require some form of registration to control access and the attempts made to circumvent it.Results from our study show that extraneous content exists on a majority of popular pages and that a 25-30% reduction in downloaded objects and bytes with corresponding latency reduction can be attained by blocking such content. The top ten advertisement delivering companies delivered 40% of all URLs matched as ads in our study. Both the server name and the remainder of the URL are important in matching a URL as an ad. A majority of popular sites require some form of registration and for such sites users can obtain an account from a shared public database. We discuss future measures and countermeasures on the part of each side.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      WWW '06: Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web
      May 2006
      1102 pages
      ISBN:1595933239
      DOI:10.1145/1135777
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Publication History

      Published: 23 May 2006

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      Author Tags

      1. anonymity
      2. content blocking
      3. privacy
      4. web registration

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      • (2019)A gradual approach for maximising user conversion without compromising experience with high visual intensity website elementsInternet Research10.1108/IntR-09-2016-027129:1(194-217)Online publication date: 4-Feb-2019
      • (2019)On the Perils of Leaking Referrers in Online Collaboration ServicesDetection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment10.1007/978-3-030-22038-9_4(67-85)Online publication date: 6-Jun-2019
      • (2017)Ads versus regular contents: Dissecting the web hosting ecosystem2017 IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking) and Workshops10.23919/IFIPNetworking.2017.8264851(1-9)Online publication date: Jun-2017
      • (2017)Security Challenges in an Increasingly Tangled WebProceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web10.1145/3038912.3052686(677-684)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2017
      • (2017)Brain activity patterns induced by interrupting the cognitive processes with online advertisingCognitive Processing10.1007/s10339-017-0815-818:4(419-430)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2017
      • (2016)Third-Party Tracking on the Web: A Swedish Perspective2016 IEEE 41st Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN)10.1109/LCN.2016.14(28-34)Online publication date: Nov-2016
      • (2016)Quality evaluation of E-government websites of Turkey2016 11th Iberian Conference on Information Systems and Technologies (CISTI)10.1109/CISTI.2016.7521567(1-7)Online publication date: Jun-2016
      • (2016)Modeling the Perceptual Response from Effects Oriented Web Components Towards Lower IntrusivenessProcedia Computer Science10.1016/j.procs.2016.08.12096:C(147-158)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2016
      • (2015)Annoyed UsersProceedings of the 2015 Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/2815675.2815705(93-106)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2015
      • (2015)Advertiser and Publisher-centric Privacy Aware Online Behavioral Advertising2015 IEEE 35th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems10.1109/ICDCS.2015.38(298-307)Online publication date: Jun-2015
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