ADVERTISING

Client: startup company
Offering: drug coupons
Domain: marketing & advertising
Challenge: discover only fresh and drug related coupons
Solution: extremely hard, requires much backend custom development
Plan: pro
Expert setup: yes
Success:

Topic is not at all clearly defined, and overlaps with several other topics. In particular, it is very hard to distinguish drug coupons from other coupons as relevant pages use very little text, and often almost the same text. Also, it is hard to detect only valid coupons as they expire quickly on respective sites, and may not be valid by the time information is served to end user.

BUSINESS

Client: contract research organization (CRO)
Offering: expert services to medical laboratories
Domain: Biotechnology
Challenge: discover CROs relevant to Alzheimer, neurodegenerative, and brain disorders
Solution: easy crawl setup and custom SQL query
Plan: basic
Expert setup: yes
Success:

Client needed to discover as many relevant CROs who could have use of their expert services. Because of how those sites write about their research and activities, traditional search engines could not easily return relevant information. While topic is not clearly defined and results retreive noise, insight that final results will be few and easy to manually verify, enabled us to use this simple setup crawl. Custom query, which spanned search accross coupled pages from same domains, was able to retrieve a list of several dozen relevant resources, a decent number in this highly specialized niche.

Challenge 2: discover pharmaceutical companies developing and testing new drugs for Alzheimer's disease
Solution 2: crawl setup and custom SQL query
Success:

Client needed to discover all pharmaceutical companies doing research for new drugs for AD. Crawl was easy to setup as the topic is well defined. Like above, a single custom query which spanned search accross coupled pages from domains was able to retrieve a list of several dozen resources, yet manual inspection of the list did not retreive enough satisfying links. Distinguishing companies which work with new drugs from those that work with old drugs was not successful.

CLASSIFIEDS

Client: garage sales search engine
Offering: yard sale search
Domain: shopping
Challenge: discovery of fresh ads from all over the web
Solution: very hard iterative setup and periodic crawl with delivery of only fresh data
Plan: pro
Expert setup: yes
Success:

Like another classifieds use case mentioned above, this task deals with discovery of only new ads. In addition, this crawl was very difficult to setup because of the topic which is not clearly defined in terms of word statistics, as few other topics use very similar words. Even though final results are quite good, additional processing on the client side is required.

EDUCATION

Client: language learning website
Offering: online language resources
Domain: language translations, word games
Challenge: provide relevant resources to visitors
Solution: simple crawl setup
Plan: pro
Expert setup: yes
Success:

A site about languages, word games, and linguistics needed a good 'resources' page. It had a custom search page which used API to get results from our topical crawl.

HOME & GARDEN

Client: exterminator
Offering: pest control
Domain: home & garden
Challenge: discover relevant resources and analyze competition
Solution: simple crawl setup & SEO link tools analysis
Plan: pro
Expert setup: yes
Success:

This was a typical use case with a straigh-forward solution. Topic is well defined, crawl was easy to setup, and SEO tools reveal best sites in the niche and potential prospect pages.

INTERNET MARKETING

Client: Chicago SEO company
Offering: SEO services
Domain: SEO
Challenge: discover useful and actionable information in the niche
Solution: average difficulty crawl setup & SEO link tools analysis
Plan: pro
Expert setup: yes
Success:

This is another typical use case for SEO professionals. In a specific public crawl 40 links from "Chicago SEO" pages were used as examples. While SEO topic is well defined, location Chicago is not exclusive to results. While relevant content was followed and gathered by crawler regardless of geolocation, finding only Chicago related domains is easy through SEO link tools. Reducing crawl to Chicago only pages would be very tricky, and from the standpoint of topical relevance questionable as many pages from Chicago SEO companies do not mention Chicago. "Cleaning up" the graph would require either specification of content phrases, or run of two crawls - first for general SEO topic, second with crawl over a list of discovered Chicago related sites in the first crawl. From the standpoint of graph analysis however, this scenario would not yield representative results, and current "fuzzy" solutions is much more appropriate.

RECREATION

Client: website owner & hicking tour organizer
Offering: hicking tours accross Serbia
Domain: travel & recreation
Challenge: discovering all relevant resources within Balkans
Solution: simple crawl with few custom SQL queries & SEO link tools analysis
Plan: basic
Expert setup: yes
Success:

A hicking enthusiast from Serbia wanted to know all the sites about hicking in Balkan mountains so that he could explore competition and places where people talk about hicking. Client has a website and needs to promote it. Analysis of the niche helped with decision making for future plan of actions. Topic is well defined and was easy to setup.

TRAVEL

Client: website owner
Offering: private accomodation
Domain: travel & tourism
Challenge: discover relevant resources for link building
Solution: few iterations of crawl setup parameters, and SEO link tools analysis
Plan: basic
Expert setup: yes
Success:

This is another typical use case for a not so well defined topic. While client wanted region specific content discovery, word statistics in the topic is such that tourism and accomodation words overweighted location specific words. Additional content phrases were needed for more accurate analysis of results. Prospect pages backlink tool was used to find relevant web pages with a few outgoing links to various domains, indicating possible link building opportunity.