Abstract
Two previous webometrics studies found a relationship between the number of inlinks to a commercial site and the company's business performance measures. Thus inlink counts to commercial sites could be a potential source of business information. However, those studies examined top ranking information technology companies in the U.S. and China. Whether the above-mentioned relationship holds for all companies regardless of ranking and in other countries is unknown. The study reported in this paper investigated this question. The study includes all information technology companies in the U.S. and Canada and gathered both business performance data and website data for these companies. It found significant correlation between business performance measures and inlinks to the company websites. The correlation was still significant even after the size of the company and the website age were accounted for. The conclusion is robust to the search engine used for data collection. Data collection issues for webometrics research were also explored.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bar-Ilan, J. (2004), The use of Web search engines in information science research. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 38: 231–288.
Information Technology Association Of America (2003), ITAA Member Companies, http://www.itaa.org/about/members.cfm, retrieved Dec. 5, 2003.
Information Technology Association Of Canada (2003), Our Members, <http://www.itac.ca/client/ITAC/Itaclive.nsf/ITACWMembers?OpenVie> & Start=1& Count=10000& Category=members, retrieved Nov. 5., 2003.
Ingwersen, P. (1998), The calculation of Web Impact Factors. Journal of Documentation, 54 (2): 236–243.
Mettrop, W., Nieuwenhuysen, P. (2001), Internet search engines-Fluctuations in document accessibility, Journal of Documentation, 57 (5): 623–651.
Mowshowitz, A., Kawaguchi, A. (2002), Assessing bias in search engines, Information Processing & Management, 38 (1): 141–156.
Notess, G. R. (2002), Search Engine Statistics: Relative Size Showdown. Retrieved Jan 28, 2004 from http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/stats/size.shtml
Reid, E. (2003), Using Web link analysis to detect and analyze hidden Web communities. In: D. Vriens, (Ed.), Information and Communications Technology for Competitive Intelligence, Hilliard, Ohio: Ideal Group Inc., pp. 57–84.
Rousseau, R. (1997), Sitations: An exploratory study. Cybermetrics, 1(1), http://www.cindoc.csic.es/cybermetrics/articles/v2i1p2.html
Rousseau, R. (1998/99), Daily time series of common single word searches in Alta Vista and Northern Light, Cybermetrics, 2/3(1), http://www.cindoc.csic.es/cybermetrics/articles/v2i1p2.html
Smith, A. G. (1999), A tale of two Web spaces: Comparing sites using Web Impact Factors, Journal of Documentation, 55 (5): 577–592.
Smith, A., Thelwall, M. (2002), Web Impact Factors for Australasian universities, Scientometrics, 54 (3): 363–380.
Sullivan, D. (2003), The Major Search Engines and Directories. Retrieved Jan. 28, 2004, from http://www.searchenginewatch.com/links/article.php/2156221
Thelwall, M. (2000a), Commercial Web sites: Lost in cyberspace? Internet Research, 10 (2): 150–159.
Thelwall, M. (2000b), Who is using the.co.uk domain? Professional and media adoption of the Web. International Journal of Information Management, 20 (6): 441–453.
Thelwall, M. (2001a), Extracting macroscopic information from Web links, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 52 (13): 1157–1168.
Thelwall, M. (2001b), The responsiveness of search engine indexes. Cybermetrics, 5 (1), http://www.cindoc.csic.es/cybermetrics/articles/v5i1p1.html
Thelwall, M. (2004), Scientific Web intelligence: Finding relationships in university Webs. To appear in Communications of the ACM.
Thelwall, M., Vaughan, L. (2004), A fair history of the Web? Examining country balance in the Internet archive. Library & Information Science Research, 26 (2): 162–176.
Thelwall, M., Wilkinson, D. (2003), Graph structure in three national academic Webs: Power laws with anomalies. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 54 (8): 706–712.
Vaughan, L. (2004a), Web hyperlinks reflect business performance: A study of U.S. and Chinese IT companies. To appear in Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science, 28 (1): 17–31.
Vaughan, L. (2004b), New measurements for search engine evaluation proposed and tested. To appear in Information Processing & Management, 40 (4) 677–691.
Vaughan, L., Thelwall, M. (2003), Scholarly use of the Web: What are the key inducers of links to journal Web sites? Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 54 (1): 29–38.
Vaughan, L., Thelwall, M. (2004), Search engine coverage bias: Evidence and possible causes. To appear in Information Processing & Management, 40 (4) 693–707.
Vaughan, L., Thelwall, M. (in press), A modeling approach to uncover hyperlink patterns: The case of Canadian universities. To appear in Information Processing & Management.
Vaughan, L., Wu, G. (2003), Link counts to commercial Web sites as a source of company information. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics, G. Jiang, R. Rousseau, Y. Wu, (Eds), Dalian University of Technology Press, Dalian, Beijing, China, Aug. 25-29, 2003, pp. 321–329.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Vaughan, L. Exploring website features for business information. Scientometrics 61, 467–477 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:SCIE.0000045122.93018.2a
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:SCIE.0000045122.93018.2a