The Application of Modern Webometric Methods on the Evaluation of Trends in the Social Network Sphere

In recent years, the Internet has been experiencing a huge boom in social networking, blogging and discussing on online forums. With the growing popularity of these communication channels, there have been arising a large number of comments on various topics from many different types of users. Such information source is not only useful for academic research, but also for commercial companies that would like to gain a direct user feedback on price, quality, and other factors of their products. However, obtaining comprehensive information from such a source is a challenging task nowadays. Our research is focused on the evaluation of the Internet trends, where the trend may be defined as anything from an event, product name, name of a person or any expression, which is mentioned online. The main emphasis of this study has been placed on the evaluation of trend in the social network sphere.