Selective performance on commercial search engines

Selective metrics on general search engines form the backbone of this chapter. We consider two categories of indicators (mention and network) to illustrate their usefulness. Based on the sample of 184 biotech companies, we gather mention metrics from two search engines (Google and Majestic) covering a wide variety of metric types (hyperlinks, websites, URL mentions, and title mentions). To illustrate the selective filters we selected four sources for mentions. In the case of Majestic, hyperlinks were collected from education (.edu) and government web domains (.gov). In the case of Google, we retrieved URL and title mentions from two samples (biotechnology sector and media) and URL co-mentions among the 184 biotech companies. Finally, on the basis of selective measurements, networks were built to obtain topological metrics, at both node and network level. The results show a high correlation between all selective mentions (regardless of the source of the mention), and between selective and global mentions. However, the number of URL mentions was quite low and, in some cases, insufficient. The title mentions, while more numerous, were limited by the inclusion of some noise in the search results (compounded by all the possible title variants that could be used), preventing us from knowing with certainty the actual number of mentions received by a company, unless manual filters were applied.