FIMS Publications
Mapping business competitive positions using web co-link analysis
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
1-1-2005
Volume
2
Journal
Proceedings of ISSI 2005: 10th International Conference of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics
First Page
534
URL with Digital Object Identifier
https://doi.org/
Last Page
543
Abstract
Based on the findings from earlier studies which showed that links to business Websites contain useful business information, we examined the feasibility of using Web co-link data to map business competitive positions. We hypothesized that the number of co-links to a pair of business Websites is a measure of the similarity between the two companies. Since similar or related businesses are competing businesses, the co-link data can be used to map business competitive positions. We selected 32 telecommunication companies for the study and collected co-link data to these companies from Yahoo!. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis on the co-link data correctly mapped these companies into telecommunication industry sectors. This proved our hypothesis and further confirmed the theory that links to business Websites can be objects for Web data mining. We collected data in a way that would reflect two markets, the global market and the Chinese market. Results from the two data sets revealed the competitive positions of the companies in the two markets. We propose that regular data collection and analysis based on this method can be used to monitor the business competitive environment and trigger early warnings on the change of the competitive landscape.