Abstract: A method and device to generate behavior for emulated visitors traversing an internet web site. The visitors may display behavior that is indistinguishable from those of actual users, a subset of the actual users, or the behavior may be purely hypothetical, such as when a visitor acts without evidence of having made an intentional choice. The invention tracks the actions of the visitors and develops reference distributions that may be compared to a site's usage distributions as obtained from actual visitors to the site. The reference distributions are then used to implement statistical estimation methods that measure relative information content. The invention comprises a general implementation and a deterministic implementation. The general version may be applied to live production web sites, and the deterministic version is best suited to offline processing.

Abstract: A method and apparatus that allows association rules defining URL-URL relationships, and URL-URL relationships that are strongly influenced by a web site's topology, to be identified and respectively qualified. Superfluous association rules may be separated from non-topology affected association rules and discounted as desired. The invention may be implemented in conjunction with a probalistic generative method used to model a web site and simulate the behavior of a visitor traversing the site. The invention further allows randomized web site visitor behavior to be separated into “interesting” and “uninteresting” behavior.