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Essential Web Mining Tools
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Web Data Mining 

Web Mining is the process of extracting data points from web pages to transform them into valuable information using data analysis and visualization tools. The main usage of data mining is extracting raw data from the internet along with web usage patterns via web scraping. In this blog, we will discuss the applications and essential web mining tools in detail.

Applications of Web Mining

Web mining is used by search engines and analytics-driven companies to improve the classification of websites and documents for better analysis. Multiple companies like Google and Yahoo use it for web searching, while others like FatLens use it for Vertical Searching. Web data mining is used to predict how the user will behave when faced with different types of user interfaces. Many tasks like landing page optimization or placement of buttons on a web page are done through the help of information gathered using web mining. Depending on the type of data extracted, web data mining can be of three types.

  1. Web content mining
  2. Web structure mining
  3. Web Usage mining

Web mining tools

In this study, we will largely focus on web content mining.

Essential Web Mining Tools

Mining the web may prove to be a formidable task if you sit to code and develop your tools. Also, since business teams are usually, the ones who use web mining tools, it’s better if they are not too code-based. This is why it is recommended that you use one of the easily available and widely used web mining solutions in case your business team has a requirement.

So we will be giving you a list of tools that you can easily integrate into your business workflow. We will start with the data acquisition solution tool or web scraping software, and follow it up with data integration tools, and data analytics, visualization, and reporting tools.

Data Acquisition

PromptCloud

While there are many of these in the market, acquiring data using web content mining has been converted from a to-and-fro problem to a DaaS (Data as a Service) solution by our team at PromptCloud. We can help you gather web-content data from any website on the internet. All you need to do is give us your requirements and we will give you the data in a plug and play format that can easily fit into your business process. Our top features include but are not limited to-

  • Fully managed service- The entire web mining pipeline would be sent up and maintained by us from setting up the crawler to run at a particular interval to cleaning and normalizing the data.
  • Dedicated support- Strong SLAs combined with prompt support would help make sure that your business can run 24×7.
  • Complete customization- You can have a list with any websites and multiple data points and our team will get it done.
  • No Maintenance- Once the data mining pipeline is set up, regular maintenance and update will be taken care of by our team so that you can reap the benefits of the scraped data without requiring to worry about the upkeep.
  • Multiple data-delivery methods- The data can be delivered to you in any format of your choice (CSV, Excel, etc) as well as any delivery method (such as APIs, Dropbox, AWS S3).

Data Integration

1. Improvado

Improvado is a data-pipelining tool, that will pull data from your marketing platforms such as Facebook and Google, and then feed it or pipe it into your data analytics tools such as Power BI. It saves a lot of time since data does not need to be moved manually by business teams, and makes the move from the collection of data to analyzing it, much faster.

Top features

a. You can integrate it with 180+ marketing platforms.

b. You can aggregate all your marketing related data in a single data warehouse.

c. Can be integrated with existing business data.

d. Complete support with dedicated service personnel is provided.

e. It is a plug-and-play solution and there’s no need for developers.

2. Xplenty

Xplenty is a popular cloud-based ETL solution that provides simple data pipelining solutions that can be visualized. It allows for the easy creation of powerful pipelines that would allow you to clean, normalize and transform data while sticking to compliance requirements. It’s popular among business teams since you can-

  • Keep the data in a central repository and allow multiple BI tools to make use of it.
  • Transfer and transform data between different databases.
  • Use a REST API to pull in data based on requirements.

Data Analytics

1. Weka

Weka is a collection of machine learning algorithms that can be used for various data mining tasks. It contains separate tools for data classification, preparation, regression, clustering, visualization and more. It was primarily designed as a tool for analyzing data collected from various agricultural domains. However, Weka 3, the latest version is completely Java-based and is now used in different application areas mainly for research.

2. Majestic

Majestic is a hugely effective web-structure mining tool that is used in business analytics. It provides strategies for Search Engine Optimization, web-based link investigation, and more. You can get reliable and latest data using this tool to analyze the performance of your websites as well as your competition. You can also get a detailed understanding of your site’s ranking in terms of backlinks. Using it, you can categorize every page or domain using link analysis or link mining.

3. SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is another web usage mining and business intelligence tool. Using its web usage mining capabilities, it empowers businesses to make better decisions. It provides support to different business departments-

  • Marketing- Using the tool, you can compare marketing channels to optimize your marketing spends to make the most of the marketing budget. You can also get a view of how organic and paid keywords brought traffic to your website.
  • Research- You can compare how your web and mobile app fared against its immediate competitors and you can monitor your market share and growth over time. You can map the key competition and understand changes in the market using the software too.
  • Sales- Generating leads and filtering them based on advanced filtering criteria can help you build better leads, which would make it easier for your sales team to fulfil their targets.
  • Investors- The software sends timely alerts while it tracks essential metrics. Using them, you can spot emerging players in your niche or important changes in the market.
4. Oracle Data Mining

ODM is a web-mining tool designed by software giant Oracle. It offers numerous data mining algorithms that can help you gain insights, make predictions, and make effective use of data. With the help of ODM, you can build predictive models within the Oracle database to predict user behavior, focus on specific customers, and also evolve customer profiles.

Other features include the discovery of cross-selling opportunities and timely alerts on discrepancies and possible frauds. Using the tool’s SQL data mining functions, you can even mine data from database tables and gather transactional as well as unstructured data. Its top features include-

  • Classification
  • Regression
  • Anomaly Detection
  • Clustering
  • Feature Selection and Extraction
  • Text Mining
  • Spatial Mining
  • Online Analytical Processing

Data Visualization and Reporting

1. Power BI

Anyone who is familiar with Microsoft’s Office 365 can connect reports, Excel queries and data models to Power BI Dashboards. Using Power BI, you can stream analytics on data collected in real-time. This way you would gather insights on the go and not only on historic data. Whether you are trying to create visualizations from data collected from factory sensors or trying to make sense out of unstructured social media data, Power BI is the tool to go for. With Power BI, you can-

  • Apply labels to Power BI data, that are similar to the ones present in other Microsoft apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
  • Extend data protection policies using Microsoft Information Protection.
  • Have oversight of sensitive data using the Microsoft Cloud Security App.
  • Prevent exposure of sensitive data by acting on threats and alerts and blocking fraud users in real-time.
2. Tableau

The fastest growing and the most powerful data visualization tool in the market, Tableau is used mainly by Business Intelligence to make some sense of the raw data collected and refined by the tech teams. Converting data into visualizations is easy using dashboards and worksheets, and these customized dashboards can be understood by people even from non-technical backgrounds.

On top of that, the operation of the software itself requires no coding and hence it is popular in all sectors be it business, or research. Using the tool, you can surround your data with different levels of access for different teams within your company. You can also use content discovery tools that would empower individuals to make more of the data.

Conclusion

We discussed tools for all three different types of web mining that we mentioned in the beginning. The usages for all depends on the requirement. While web content mining tools are a requirement for companies trying to gather data from the internet, web usage mining tools are usually used by companies who want to track usage and other metrics of their own and other competition websites.

Web structure mining tools are used by different business teams for planning Search Engine Optimization strategies, marketing options and more. As more and more businesses move to the web, web mining is becoming an integral part of businesses that want to keep a check on their competition while collecting data from the internet and also keeping track of their performance metrics.


Are you looking for a web crawling solution to collect data for web content mining? Get started by submitting your requirements here.

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