Suppose that you are employed as a data mining consultant for an In- ternet search engine company. Describe how data mining can help the company by giving specific examples of how techniques, such as clus- tering, classification, association rule mining, and anomaly detection can be applied.

What will be an ideal response?
The following are examples of possible answers.

• Clustering can group results with a similar theme and present
them to the user in a more concise form, e.g., by reporting the
10 most frequent words in the cluster.
• Classification can assign results to pre-defined categories such as
“Sports,” “Politics,” etc.
• Sequential association analysis can detect that that certain queries
follow certain other queries with a high probability, allowing for
more efficient caching.
• Anomaly detection techniques can discover unusual patterns of
user traffic, e.g., that one subject has suddenly become much
more popular. Advertising strategies could be adjusted to take
advantage of such developments.