zveloDB™ is the market’s premium URL database and web classification service, providing best-in-class accuracy and coverage. The zveloDB supports nearly 500 topic-based, malicious, phishing, objectionable and sensitive categories, powering the world’s leading Web and DNS Filtering, Endpoint Security, Brand Safety, Contextual Targeting, Subscriber Analytics, and other applications.
The prospect, a leading provider of big data analytics solutions, had identified a need to capture, curate, categorize and visualize the massive amounts of web usage data sets stemming from mobile service providers…
DetailsIf one performs the search “use www or not,” well over a billion results in many of the most popular search engines are returned. The focus of each result may differ. For zvelo, the usage is irrelevant because its contextual categorization processes are designed to identify and handle each component of a URL. At a simplistic view, the basic components of a URL are the following:
zvelo once offered 53 categories that were used to classify content on websites about Businesses & Services, Politics & Law, Portal Sites and others. This was later raised to 141 categories to help cover even more topics. The latest version boasts nearly 500 categories, making it one of the most granular categorization sets in the industry. We’ve managed to upgrade our categorization systems to better serve the needs of our existing and future technology partners and following is one example why this matters.
Given the dynamic nature of the majority of today’s websites, categorization at the full path URL versus the base domain is superior and now required. Parts of a website include the top-level domain (.com, .org, etc.), the base domain (example.com), sub-domain (subdomain.example.com) or sub-path (example.com/page). When categorizing content, it is highly important to recognize exactly what is being classified within a website because content can differ dramatically across full path URLs.
What is a URL parameter? Quite simply it is a string of characters, or a query string, that is appended to a URL that contains data. This data is passed to predefined web applications to find the appropriate content and return it back to the user’s web browser which then generates the entire web page. The query string can also be used for various other methods such as identifying a user’s session or using it as a way to look up information about your online bank account after you have logged in. URLs with parameters are used by various types of web sites however online shopping, auction, and banking type sites are probably the most prevalent.
Manually classifying the content on a single web page takes but a few seconds to accomplish. Analyzing the keywords – words or phrases – used and the number of instances of each – keyword density – is one way to go about it. When needing to classify the content on billions of web pages at a time, however, the task becomes overwhelmingly daunting for any human eye to handle. In this scenario, only an automated content classification engine can succeed.
Anatomy of a Dynamic Website Of the hundreds of billions of URL queries zvelo has received for website categorization in 2013, an estimated 27% have been classified as being dynamic (see image 1). Dynamic categories in this data sample included Social Networking, News, Search Engines, Personal Pages & Blogs, Community Forums, Technology (General), and Chat.…
How does zvelo provide the most accurate content categorization service and the best URL database available? The approach is two-fold and while a substantial chunk of the workload is handled by zvelo’s line-up of machine learning and artificial intelligence-based categorization processes and systems, the quality assurance and other daily efforts put forth by its human Web Analysts can never be discounted.
Static HTML websites are becoming increasingly rare, and nowadays sites pack quite the punch. We’ve grown accustomed to photo and video slideshows, widgets, feeds, social network integrations, and other dynamic elements. Websites come overloaded with media, are more interactive, and the content can vary dramatically from page-to-page and can differ even more between end-users or browsing sessions. Much of the content is pulled in dynamically from external sources and most of us fuel the Internet’s growth by creating and uploading content of our own daily and at extremely high upload rates. Making sense of it all can be quite the challenge for technology vendors “needing to know” and following are insights into zvelo’s content categorization approach.
Ad blocking has gained wide consumer acceptance over the past couple of years and a PageFair report suggests it could be costing web-based businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost advertising revenue. In some instances, ad blocking negatively impacted a select number of websites so much they are no longer online. With the use of ad blocking software on the rise, there exists a significant requirement by the ad-tech market to make the most of those actual ad placements that make the cut. In other words, it’s more important than ever for ad units to be in-context with content on web pages, no matter how deep within a website the placements land.