Web mining gathers data from online sources for analysis to make business decisions. It focuses on web-based information and is divided into three categories: web structure, usage, and content mining. It provides valuable information for marketers and is also used in academia to check for plagiarism.
Web mining is a form of information gathering that applies to data gathered from online sources. Gathering data from Internet sources allows users to aggregate large volumes of information for analysis to make key business decisions in an online environment. For example, a researcher might use web mining to gather information about the use of specific keywords in web content. Alternatively, retailers and other marketers use online data mining to spot trends in web traffic, conversion of site visitors to buyers, and other web uses.
In terms of collecting, sorting and analyzing data, web mining mimics traditional data mining activities. Comparatively, web mining focuses on web-based information, rather than a large cross-section of information sources such as offline computer databases, customer records, or paper accounting data, as is typically the case with traditional data mining. Focusing solely on collecting data from online sources provides targeted analysis needed for online marketing strategies, website design decisions, and similar decision-making processes related to e-commerce. Gathering data via web mining also provides the added benefit of broad international demographics, as websites from around the world are available to researchers and information gatherers.
Professionally, web mining is divided into three specific categories: web structure mining, usage mining, and web content mining. Each area focuses on specific information such as the structure and hyperlinks of a particular website, server log information regarding visitor usage, and specific content available online. Website analytics software packages and services are a great example of web usage mining, providing webmasters with insights into visitor traffic, search results used, links clicked, and time spent interacting with specific pages . Structure mining, on the other hand, provides detailed information about the internal structure of a specific website, including hyperlinks, databases, and query functions.
To the marketer, web mining offers a wealth of uses related to marketing activities. Knowing how site visitors use a particular website, how competitors create a competing site, and what content is already online is invaluable information. Such information helps key decision makers create a marketing strategy based on previously proven techniques and documented information.
Colleges and universities also use web mining through software that verifies that student documents are unique and not plagiarized. Using web content mining principles, these classification helpers search the entire Internet for similar content. Instructors upload text from a student paper and then tell the plagiarism checker to check the Internet for similar phrases or text copied online. The results are often expressed as a percentage of the matched text. Links to similar results are provided for instructors to visit the sites to determine if the matches are indeed plagiarized.
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