Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
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The study examined the possibility of constructing business profiles (specifically, product profiles) based on keyword patterns on various types of Web sites, including a company's own Web site, blog sites, and Web sites that have particular keywords and also hyperlinks pointing to company Web sites. To test the proposed methods, we selected China's four major oil companies and two other companies that have related products. We collected three rounds of data over a 7-month period from these three Web sources and analyzed the numbers of retrieved pages to construct business profiles. The business profiles constructed were checked against business information collected from other sources such as company annual reports and company newsletters to determine the correctness of the profiles and thus the usefulness of the proposed methods. We found that we can construct fairly accurate profiles by examining the frequency distribution of product keywords on company Web sites. Analyzing the frequency distribution of blogs on various topics was very useful in following major business events and developments during particular time periods. We also conducted qualitative content analysis for a sample of 454 Web pages retrieved from the three sources. Findings from the content analysis confirmed the conclusions from the quantitative analysis. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.