The study and analysis of behavior has been around for centuries. The father of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud, used behavioral analysis to understand the inner workings of the human mind. Behaviorism, a school of thought that emphasizes the study of observable behavior, also has its roots in early psychology. In the 1930s, B. F. Skinner developed the theory of operant conditioning, which posits that behavior is shaped by its consequences. more today, behavioral analysis is used in a variety of fields, including medicine, marketing, and criminology.
In recent years, behavioral analysis has also been used to understand and predict online behavior. The vast majority of our online activity takes place on the world wide web, which is made up of billions of interconnected computers. When we browse the web, we leave behind a digital trail of our activity in the form of DNS requests and log files. This data can be analyzed to understand our behavior patterns and even predict future behavior.
DNS is the system that converts human-readable domain names (like www.google.com) into IP addresses (the numeric addresses that computers use to communicate with each other). Every time we visit a website, our computer sends a DNS request to a DNS server to look up the IP address for that site. The DNS server then responds with the IP address, and our computer uses that address to connect to the website’s server and load the site.
DNS requests can be analyzed to understand what websites we visit and how often we visit them. Log files are another type of data that can be analyzed to understand online behavior. Every time we visit a website, the website’s server records information about our visit in a log file. This information can include our IP address, the time and date of our visit, what pages we viewed on the site, and even what browser we were using.
By analyzing DNS requests and log files, it is possible to understand our online behavior patterns and even predict future behavior. For example, if you know that someone regularly visits websites about sports cars, you could reasonably conclude that this person is interested in buying a sports car. Similarly, if you see someone visiting websites about weight loss surgery procedures, you might conclude that this person is considering having weight loss surgery themselves.
Behavioral analysis using DNS requests and log files is a powerful tool for understanding online behavior. However, it is important to remember that this data only tells us what people do online; it does not tell us why they do it. To truly understand why people do something requires qualitative research methods such as interviews or surveys.
