Web site administrators are extremely interested in questions like "How are people using the site?", "Which pages are being accessed most frequently?", etc. These questions require the analysis of the structure of hyperlinks as well as the contents of the pages. The end products of such analysis might include 1) the frequency of visits per document, 2) most recent visit per document, 3) who is visiting which documents, 4) frequency of use of each hyperlink, and 5) most recent use of each hyperlink.
The discovery of Web usage patterns, carried out by techniques described earlier, would not be very useful unless there were mechanisms and tools to help an analyst better understand them. Hence, in addition to developing techniques for mining usage patterns form Web logs, there is a need to develop techniques and tools for enabling the analysis of discovered patterns. These techniques are expected to draw upon from a number of fields including statistics, graphics and visualization, usability analysis, and database querying. In this section we provide a survey of the existing tools and techniques. Usage analysis of Web access behavior being a very new area, there is very little work in it, and correspondingly this survey is not very extensive.