Majestic, world leaders in distributed web crawling, maintain one of the largest indexes of URLs on the web in a proprietary database. The company, based on Birmingham Science Park, are entering into a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) with Aston Business School which aims to introduce a suite of new innovative big data analysis tools. The tools, known as Majestic Analytics, will allow non-programmers to use them to draw previously unavailable inference and insight from large data sets of internet usage and company orientated data.

Majestic, a leading source of rich internet link data for SEO specialists and web marketers, have identified an opportunity for competitive advantage through the partnership, as Majestic Analytics will offer its users previously unavailable insights and quantitative metrics of their own clients and markets. For example, where a human may be able to see a Twitter profile of a friend, an email address of a friend and a name of a friend and know they are all related to the same friend, a computer does not see the direct connection. By using leading edge statistical methods, relational distance and probability, these relationships can be assumed by understanding the underlying connections and use this to build up much better views of the data.     

The interfaces will be sold commercially, allowing companies to improve their digital marketing efforts by more accurately profiling and better understanding clients.

Alexey Chudnovsky, Managing Director of Majestic commented:

“We really look forward in working in partnership with Aston Business School and being able to access the expertise available at Aston to help us develop our business further. We hope that this KTP project will provide our clients with valuable insights in their digital marketing efforts.”

Dr Graham Leask, Lecturer at Aston University said,

“Working with Majestic supports Aston’s mission to support regional SMEs through impactful research. This project gives us opportunities for new research trajectories, new student projects and case studies for undergraduate and post graduate programmes."

"With the ever increasing depth and quality of data available today a key element of sustainable competitive advantage will be the ability to  interrogate and understand patterns in big data. Such patterns allow firms to more effectively map competition, track emergent brand success and position themselves optimally in an increasingly competitive market place. The tools developed here will make this level of sophisticated competitive analytics and its practical application accessible to firms and companies irrespective of size."

To find out more about how your business can benefit from working with Aston University, please email rke@aston.ac.uk or call 0121 204 4242.