Content assisted web co-link analysis for competitive intelligence

Building on a previous study that succeeded in mapping business competition positions at an industry level using Web co-link analysis, the current study attempted to improve Web co-link analysis by adding Web page content to obtain the mapping at a particular market segment level. This method combines the ideas of Web content mining (keyword) with Web structure mining (hyperlink). The method was tested in the WiMAX sector of the telecommunication industry. WiMAX is defined as Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access by the WiMAX Forum, the exclusive organization dedicated to certifying the interoperability of broadband wireless access products (Wikipedia, 2006). Specifically, the keyword WiMAX was incorporated into queries that searched for co-links to pairs of company Websites. Two sets of data were collected: one with the proposed method and one with co-link search alone. The resulting two data matrices were analyzed using multidimensional scaling (MDS) to generate maps of business competition. The comparison between the two maps shows that the proposed method produced a map focusing on the WiMAX sector. The study also proposed the measure of reduction of co-link count that can be used to gauge the effectiveness of focusing the analysis on a particular sector. The reduction of co-link count could also be an easy and pragmatic measure for an analysis of a company\u27s competitiveness in a particular market segment