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Web mining is the process of using data mining techniques and algorithms to extract information directly from the Web by extracting it from Web documents and services, Web content, hyperlinks and server logs. The goal of Web mining is to look for patterns in Web data by collecting and analyzing information in order to gain insight into trends, the industry and users in general.
Techopedia Explains Web Mining
Web mining is a branch of data mining concentrating on the World Wide Web as the primary data source, including all of its components from Web content, server logs to everything in between. The contents of data mined from the Web may be a collection of facts that Web pages are meant to contain, and these may consist of text, structured data such as lists and tables, and even images, video and audio.
Categories of Web mining:
- Web content mining — This is the process of mining useful information from the contents of Web pages and Web documents, which are mostly text, images and audio/video files. Techniques used in this discipline have been heavily drawn from natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval.
- Web structure mining — This is the process of analyzing the nodes and connection structure of a website through the use of graph theory. There are two things that can be obtained from this: the structure of a website in terms of how it is connected to other sites and the document structure of the website itself, as to how each page is connected.
- Web usage mining — This is the process of extracting patterns and information from server logs to gain insight on user activity including where the users are from, how many clicked what item on the site and the types of activities being done on the site.
