Redips: Backlink search and analysis on the Web for business intelligence analysis

for business intelligence analysis as it can provide information about a company's external environment and its stakeholders. Traditional business intelligence analysis on the Web has focused on simple keyword searching. Recently, it has been suggested that the incoming links, or backlinks, of a company's Web site (i.e., other Web pages that have a hyperlink pointing to the company of interest) can provide important insights about the com-pany's " online communities. " Although analysis of these communities can provide useful signals for a company and information about its stakeholder groups, the manual analysis process can be very time-consuming for business analysts and consultants. In this article, we present a tool called Redips that automatically integrates backlink meta-searching and text-mining techniques to facilitate users in performing such business intelligence analysis on the Web. The architectural design and implementation of the tool are presented in the article. To evaluate the effectiveness, efficiency, and user satisfaction of Redips, an experiment was conducted to compare the tool with two popular business intelligence analysis methods—using backlink search engines and manual browsing. The experiment results showed that Redips was statistically more effective than both benchmark methods (in terms of Recall and F-measure) but required more time in search tasks. In terms of user satisfaction, Redips scored statistically higher than backlink search engines in all five measures used, and also statistically higher than manual browsing in three measures. Introduction Business intelligence can be defined as the process of monitoring a firm's external environment to obtain information relevant to its decision-making process (Gilad & Gilad, 1988). In the past, the sources of business intelligence information mainly consisted of published company reports, subscription-based online databases, and other kinds of printed information. However, this practice has changed significantly in the past 10 years. With the advances in information technologies, many resources and information are now accessible on the Web. In late 2004, Google announced that they had indexed more than 8 billion Web pages. The Web has become a large repository of information that could be relevant to a firm's decision making. For example, looking into the Web sites of a firm's competitors can reveal useful information about the firm's competitive environment (Chen, Chau, & Zeng, 2002). The Web sites of other stakeholders of the firm, like customers, suppliers, and pressure groups, can also provide important information about the firm's competitive environment. As the Web sites of these stakeholders often have …