Some good folks at the University of Hamburg published an update to some long standing historical numbers in web usage research that reveal the way users are browsing the web has changed dramatically over the last few years. Here's the punchline:

Table 1: Comparison chart of three long-term studies

	Catledge & Pitkow3	Tauscher & Greenberg3	This Study
Time of study	1994	1995-1996	2004-2005
No. of users	107	23	25
Length (days)	21	35-42	52-195, ø=105
No. of visits	31,134	84,841	137,272
Recurrence rate	61%	58%	45.6%
Link	45.7%	43.4%	43.5%
Back	35.7%	31.7%	14.3%
Submit	-	4.4%	15.3%
New window	0.2%	0.8%	10.5%
Direct access	12.6%	13.2%	9.4%
Reload	4.3%	3.3%	1.7%
Forward	1.5%	0.8%	0.6%
Other	-	2.3%	4.8%

In particular, note the dramatic increase in new window usage (including tabs). Usage of the back button is decreased, probably directly related to new window/tabs as an alternate page view management strategy. This work also produced the sexiest image of the conference, a positional click map aggregated across all the users studied and all the pages they viewed.


The dense region at the lower right is the search engine next button.  WWW has a long tradition of publishing the proceedings online.  This year the papers are available in XHTML, here's the link for this work.