A Novel Bipartite Graph Based Competitiveness Degree Analysis from Query Logs

Competitiveness degree analysis is a focal point of business strategy and competitive intelligence, aimed to help managers closely monitor to what extent their rivals are competing with them. This article proposes a novel method, namely BCQ, to measure the competitiveness degree between peers from query logs as an important form of user generated contents, which reflects the "wisdom of crowds" from the search engine users' perspective. In doing so, a bipartite graph model is developed to capture the competitive relationships through conjoint attributes hidden in query logs, where the notion of competitiveness degree for entity pairs is introduced, and then used to identify the competitive paths mapped in the bipartite graph. Subsequently, extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of BCQ to quantify the competitiveness degrees. Experimental results reveal that BCQ can well support competitors ranking, which is helpful for devising competitive strategies and pursuing market performance. In addition, efficiency experiments on synthetic data show a good scalability of BCQ on large scale of query logs.