What is Web Mining?

Web mining can be broadly defined as discovery and analysis of useful information from the World Wide Web. Based on the different emphasis and different ways to obtain information, web mining can be divided into two major parts: Web Contents Mining and Web Usage Mining. Web Contents Mining can be described as the automatic search and retrieval of information and resources available from millions of sites and on-line databases though search engines / web spiders. Web Usage Mining can be described as the discovery and analysis of user access patterns, through the mining of log files and associated data from a particular Web site.