Visualizing web site comparisons

Abstract

The Web is increasingly becoming an important channel for conducting businesses, disseminating information, and communicating with people on a global scale. More and more companies, organizations, and individuals are publishing their information on the Web. With all this information publicly available, naturally companies and individuals want to find useful information from these Web pages. As an example, companies always want to know what their competitors are doing and what products and services they are offering. Knowing such information, the companies can learn from their competitors and/or design countermeasures to improve their own competitiveness. The ability to effectively find such business intelligence information is increasingly becoming crucial to the survival and growth of any company. Despite its importance, little work has been done in this area. In this paper, we propose a novel visualization technique to help the user find useful information from his/her competitors' Web site easily and quickly. It involves visualizing (with the help of a clustering system) the comparison of the user's Web site and the competitor's Web site to find similarities and differences between the sites. The visualization is such that with a single glance, the user is able to see the key similarities and differences of the two sites. He/she can then quickly focus on those interesting clusters and pages to browse the details. Experiment results and practical applications show that the technique is effective.