Kimberly Ruth (Stanford)
October 7, 2022 at 11:00 AM on Zoom / Soda Hall
A World Wide View of the World Wide Web
Abstract: Despite the pervasiveness of the modern web, we know surprisingly little about how people use it. In this talk, I’ll discuss two recent works aimed at understanding what web browsing looks like today, both appearing at IMC 2022. First, I’ll analyze lists of most popular websites, such as the Alexa Top Million, that are widely used in security and networking research but are not well vetted for accuracy. I’ll show that most top website lists capture web popularity poorly, with the exception of the Chrome User Experience Report dataset. Second, I’ll describe the first large-scale study of how people spend time on the web, using data from Chrome browser telemetry spanning hundreds of millions of users. I’ll explore how traffic is distributed among top websites, where people spend time on the web, and what differences we see in web browsing geographically. Finally, I’ll conclude with recommendations for how the research community can more accurately analyze the web in the future.
Bio: Kimberly Ruth is a third-year Ph.D. student at Stanford in the Empirical Security Research Group advised by Zakir Durumeric. Her research interests are in security and Internet measurement. She is a recipient of an NSF GRFP fellowship, a Stanford EDGE Fellowship, and a CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award.