What are the applications of web mining?

Web mining defines the process of using data mining techniques to extract beneficial patterns trends and data generally with the help of the web by dealing with it from web-based records and services, server logs, and hyperlinks. Web mining aims to discover the designs in web information by grouping and analyzing data to receive important insights.

Web mining can widely be viewed as the application of adapted data mining methods to the web, whereas data mining is represented as the application of the algorithm to find patterns on mostly structured data fixed into a knowledge discovery process.

There are various applications of web mining which are as follows −

• Web mining is used to discover how users navigate a website and the results can help in improving the site design and making it more visible on the web.
• In Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Web mining is the unification of data gathered by traditional data mining approaches and techniques with data gathered over the World Wide Web. Web mining can learn user behavior, compute the effectiveness of a specific Web site, and provide quantify the success of a marketing campaign.
• The popularity of digital images is quickly increasing because of enhancing digital imaging technologies and convenient availability supported by the web. However, how to find customer-intended images from the web is non-trivial. The main reason is that the web images are generally not annotated utilizing semantic descriptors. It is used to fetch web images from the internet, web mining is utilized.
• Web mining is used for keyphrase extraction. Keyphrases are beneficial for several purposes, such as summarizing, indexing, labeling, categorizing, clustering, featuring, scanning, and searching. The task of automatic keyphrase extraction is to select keyphrases from within the text of a given document. Automatic keyphrase extraction creates it feasible to make keyphrases for the large number of files that do not have manually assigned keyphrases.
• Web mining is used for social network analysis. A social network is the study of social entities (person in an organization, known as actors), and their connections and relationships.
• Social network analysis is helpful for the Web because the Web is significantly a virtual society, and therefore a virtual social web, where every page can be regarded as a social actor and every hyperlink as a relationship. Many of the results from social networks can be adapted and extended for use in the Web context. The ideas from social network analysis are indeed instrumental to the success of Web search engines.