Using company websites as a new data source in academic research
The challenge
Prof. Dr. Michael D. König, associate professor at the University of Amsterdam and researcher at ETH Institute Switzerland, looked into new ways to measure how companies had been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. He needed to make a descriptive statistics analysis on the effects of the pandemic in different sectors and countries over time. In addition to alternative data sources, his research entailed the use of structured web data to discover which companies had mentioned the word “corona” or one of its synonyms on their websites and in what context.
The solution
To get exhaustive information on what had been written on companies' websites about the Covid-19 pandemic, he used our structured Search Engine for his preliminary keywords breakdown. Then, he analyzed the context in which companies had mentioned “corona” or one of its synonyms on their websites. This web-based approach allowed him to discover and analyze what problems businesses had faced during the first and second wave of the pandemic, which sectors had been most affected and how that had changed across different regions and countries.
The result
He made use of broad web data coverage that can’t be found in other data sources. This allowed him to put together an almost complete picture of the entire economies of different countries and made an in-depth overview of how companies were affected by the Covid-19 pandemic and of the different policy measures implemented across various regions, countries and sectors.
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