Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

Web mining aims to discover useful information and knowledge from the Web hyperlink structure, page contents, and usage data. Although Web mining uses many conventional data mining techniques, it is not purely an application of traditional data mining due to the semistructured and unstructured nature of the Web data and its heterogeneity. It has also developed many of its own algorithms and techniques.

Liu has written a comprehensive text on Web data mining. Key topics of structure mining, content mining, and usage mining are covered both in breadth and in depth. His book brings together all the essential concepts and algorithms from related areas such as data mining, machine learning, and text processing to form an authoritative and coherent text.

The book offers a rich blend of theory and practice, addressing seminal research ideas, as well as examining the technology from a practical point of view. It is suitable for students, researchers and practitioners interested in Web mining both as a learning text and a reference book. Lecturers can readily use it for classes on data mining, Web mining, and Web search. Additional teaching materials such as lecture slides, datasets, and implemented algorithms are available online.

Average Customer Rating:

Excellent graduate text and reference

Customer Rating:

This book makes a great text for graduate courses, as well as a reference for scholars. The chapters are well written and provide good examples for any significant concepts. Each section covers the basics to establish a foundation of understanding for someone unfamiliar with the area, but goes on to also touch upon the research forefront on each topic. One of the most useful sections I've found as a researcher is the Bibliographic Notes found at the end of each section which briefly describes the major groups of work within the topic with cites to major papers/articles/books in each of these areas (seems to be about 50 or so per chapter). The only "drawback" to this book would be if you wanted to touch upon everything, there is far too much content for a single semester. However as mentioned above, the chapters are structured such that you could easily use the first couple sections of each chapter to cover all the foundations and either leave later sections for students to read on their own/select an advanced project, or cover the remainder in a 2nd semester. I highly recommend this book to any graduate looking for a comprehensive text and reference on web mining. (In the interest of full disclosure, I am listed in the acknowledgements from providing feedback on a pre-print edition of the text that was used as our course textbook. I do not get royalties from sales in any way.)