Mining the web for business intelligence: Homepage analysis in the internet era

Abstract

Information in websites provides good opportunities for marketers to understand and to acquire potential customers through the internet. The essence of web mining is to use powerful search engines to convert unorganised text information into customer intelligence stored in a database. In this paper, the authors construct a dictionary of 80,750 keywords/phrases to identify the portraits of 6,173 students from self-revealed information in their personal homepages. The authors summarise their empirical results and report the technological limitations and marketing challenges of web mining.