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The study seeks to apply Web co‐word analysis to the Chinese business environment to test the feasibility of the method there.

The authors selected a group of companies in two Chinese industries, collected co‐word data for the companies, analyzed the data with multidimensional scaling (MDS), and then compared the MDS maps generated from the co‐word data with business situations to find out if the co‐word method works.

The study found that the Web co‐word method could potentially be applied to the Chinese environment. The study also found the advantages and disadvantages of the Web co‐word method vs the Web co‐link method.

Knowing the applicability of the Web co‐word method to the Chinese environment contributes to the knowledge of this new Webometrics method. Mining business information from the Web is more valuable when applied to a foreign country where language and culture barriers exist. To use the co‐word method, one does not have to be able to read or write in that language. One only needs to have the names of the companies to study, which can be easily obtained without knowledge of the language. The value of business information about countries such as China is obvious given the global nature of contemporary business competition and the significance of the Chinese economy to the world.

Title and URL mentions have recently been proposed as web visibility indicators instead of inlink counts. The objective of this study is to determine the accuracy of these alternative web mention indicators in the Spanish academic system, taking into account their complexity (multi-domains) and diversity (different official languages).

Inlinks, title and URL mentions from 76 Spanish universities were manually extracted from the main search engines (Google, Google Scholar, Yahoo!, Bing and Exalead). Several statistical methods, such as correlation, difference tests and regression models, were used.

Web mentions, despite some limitations, can be used as substitutes for inlinks in the Spanish academic system, although these indicators are more likely to be influenced by the environment (language, web domain policy, etc.) than inlinks.

Title mentions provide unstable results caused by the multiple name variants which an institution can present (such as acronyms and other language versions). URL mentions are more stable, but they may present atypical points due to some shortcomings, the effect of which is that URL mentions do not have the same meaning as inlinks.

Web mentions should be used with caution and after a cleaning-up process. Moreover, these counts do not necessarily signify connectivity, so their use in global web analysis should be limited.

Web mentions have previously been used in some specific academic systems (US, UK and China), but this study analyses, in depth and for the first time, an entire non-English speaking European country (Spain), with complex academic web behaviour, which helps to better explain previous web mention results.

The paper seeks to extend co‐link analysis to web sites of heterogeneous companies belonging to different industries and countries, and to cluster companies by industries and compare results from different countries.

Web sites of 255 companies that belong to five stock exchange indexes were included in the study. Data on co‐links pointing to these web sites were gathered using Yahoo!. Co‐link data were analyzed using multidimensional scaling (MDS) to generate MDS maps that would position companies based on their co‐link counts.

Comparisons of results across different countries and economies showed the following overall pattern: companies whose businesses are information‐based tend to form well‐defined clusters, while companies operating on a more traditional business model tend not to form clear groups. A comparison between the EU zone and the USA suggests that the EU economy is not well integrated yet.

The findings from the study suggest the possibility of using co‐link analysis to distinguish information‐based industries from traditional industries.

The paper extends co‐link analysis from a single industry to heterogeneous industries with global and complex business phenomena.

The purpose of this paper is to theoretically analyze and empirically test the business value of firm web visibility, including its relationship to advertising efficiency and long-term financial performance (i.e. shareholder value).

A conceptual framework is established to analyze firm value of web visibility through its market effects. Hypotheses on the associations between firm web visibility and advertising efficiency and shareholder value are tested by cross-sectional analysis of 1,331 firms in six industries and four industry sectors. The authors control for several firm- and industry-level factors.

The results consistently support the two hypotheses, i.e., first, a positive and significant relationship between firm web visibility and advertising efficiency; and second, a positive and significant relationship between firm web visibility and shareholder value.

In addition to increasing web traffic, firm web visibility has business value and helps to enhance advertising efficiency and shareholder value. Managers can use the web references as a valuable tool for marketing success when the use of traditional advertising reaches saturation. Managers should actively monitor and use web visibility as a web management measure in practice.

This research provides convincing evidence to support both short-term and long-term business value of web visibility and suggests that web visibility be recognized and managed as a market-based asset.

The purpose of this paper is to seek reasons for some videos going viral over YouTube (a type of social media platform).

Using YouTube APIs (Application Programming Interface) and Webometrics analyst tool, the authors collected data on about 100 all-time-most-viewed YouTube videos and information about the users associated with the videos. The authors constructed and tested an empirical model to understand the relationship among users’ social and non-social capital (e.g. User Age, Gender, View Count, Subscriber, Join Date, Total Videos Posted), video characteristics (Post Date, Duration, and Video Category), external network capital (in-links and hit counts), and Virality (Likes, Dislikes, Favorite Count, View Count, and Comment Count). Partial least square and Webometric analysis was used to explore the association among the constructs.

Among other findings, the results showed that popularity of the videos was not only the function of YouTube system per se, but that network dynamics (e.g. in-links and hits counts) and offline social capital (e.g. fan base and fame) play crucial roles in the viral phenomenon, particularly view count.

The authors for the first time constructed and tested an empirical model to find out the determinants of viral phenomenon over YouTube.

This study aims to present a new web page recommendation system that can help users to reduce navigational time on the internet.

The proposed design is based on the primacy effect of browsing behavior, that users prefer top ranking items in search results. This approach is intuitive and requires no training data at all.

A user study showed that users are more satisfied with the proposed search methods than with general search engines using hot keywords. Moreover, two performance measures confirmed that the proposed search methods out‐perform other metasearch and search engines.

The research has limitations and future work is planned along several directions. First, the search methods implemented are primarily based on the keyword match between the contents of web pages and the user query items. Using the semantic web to recommend concepts and items relevant to the user query might be very helpful in finding the exact contents that users want, particularly when the users do not have enough knowledge about the domains in which they are searching. Second, offering a mechanism that groups search results to improve the way search results are segmented and displayed also assists users to locate the contents they need. Finally, more user feedback is needed to fine‐tune the search parameters including α and β to improve the performance.

The proposed model can be used to improve the search performance of any search engine.

First, compared with the democratic voting procedure used by metasearch engines, search engine vector voting (SVV) enables a specific combination of search parameters, denoted as α and β, to be applied to a voted search engine, so that users can either narrow or expand their search results to meet their search preferences. Second, unlike page quality analysis, the hyperlink prediction (HLP) determines qualified pages by simply measuring their user behavior function (UBF) values, and thus takes less computing power. Finally, the advantages of HLP over statistical analysis are that it does not need training data, and it can target both multi‐site and site‐specific analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to specify user‐defined relevance criteria by which people select hyperlinks and pages in web searching.

A quantitative and qualitative analysis was undertaken of talking aloud data from nine web searches conducted about self‐generated topics.

Altogether 18 different criteria for selecting hyperlinks and web pages were found. The selection is constituted, by two, intertwined processes: the relevance judgment of hyperlinks, and web pages by user‐defined criteria, and decision‐making concerning the acceptance or rejection of hyperlinks and web pages. The study focuses on the former process. Of the individual criteria, specificity, topicality, familiarity, and variety were used most frequently in relevance judgments. The study shows that despite the high number of individual criteria used in the judgments, a few criteria such as specificity and topicality tend to dominate. Searchers were less critical in the judgment of hyperlinks than deciding whether the activated web pages should be consulted in more detail.

The study is exploratory, drawing on a relatively low number of case searches.

The paper gives a detailed picture of the criteria used in the relevance judgments of hyperlinks and web pages. The study also discusses the specific nature of criteria used in web searching, as compared to those used in traditional online searching environments.

The blogging phenomenon has become a primary mode of mainstream communication for the Web 2.0 era. While previous studies found that campaign web sites did not realise two‐way communication ideals, the current study aims to investigate potential differences in communication patterns between campaign blogs and web sites during Taiwan's 2008 general election, with the aim of exploring whether the blogging phenomenon can improve the process of online political communication.

The study used a content analysis approach, the web style analysis method, which was designed specifically for analysing web content, and applied it to an online campaign context in a different political culture, using Taiwan's general election as a case study.

Results indicated that the themes of both campaign blogs and web sites focused on “attacking opponents” rather than focusing on political policies or information on particular issues. However, campaign blogs and web sites significantly differed in all other dimensions, including structural features, functions, interactivity and appeal strategies. Overall, in terms of the online democratic ideal, campaign blogs appeared to allow more democratic, broader, deeper and easier two‐way communication models between candidates and voters or among voters.

The current study focused on candidates' blogs and web sites and did not explore the other vast parts of the online political sphere, particularly independent or citizen‐based blogs, which play significant roles in the decentralised and participant‐networked public spheres.

The study illuminates the role of hyperlinks on campaign blogs. By providing a greater abundance of external links than campaign web sites, campaign blogs allowed more voters, especially younger ones, to share political information in a manner that is quite different from the traditional one‐way communication model. The paper also argues that interactivity measures should be incorporated into the web style analysis method.

The purpose of this paper is to probe the external visibility of the web sites of all seven ALA‐accredited Canadian library and information science (LIS) schools. The number of inlinks to the schools' web sites is used as an indicator of the visibility of all or some portions of the LIS web sites.

Inlinks pointing to the LIS school web sites were collected using the AlltheWeb search engine. The LIS school web pages pointed to by inlinks were manually analysed to discover visible topics and contents.

Four content clusters were identified by which to group the content of all the inlinked LIS school web pages. These clusters were LIS, research, home page and resources. The most visible cluster was the LIS cluster and the least visible was the research cluster. The most visible topics were student projects/activities, LIS‐related resources and course‐related information, in that order. The home page of each LIS school's web site was shown to be the single web page with the most visibility.

This was a comparative webometric study, which collected and analysed inlinks for seven Canadian LIS school web sites at two different times, 3 years apart (2003 and 2006). In the study, the ranking of visible clusters, topics and web pages from the LIS web sites were identified.