The ever increasing data on the Web has given rise to a new field of software for Web mining. It helps in filtering the content and tracking user trends. At present, the World Wide Web is overwhelmed with data and it is expanding its boundaries like a balloon of infinite size. There is a huge, growing database, as data gets regularly added to the Web. The exponential growth of internet has led to new field of data mining, which is known as Web mining. It can be considered as an extension of traditional search methodology. There is an enormous amount of data lying unused, which if used productively, can result in many benefits.

Web mining can be used by a website owner to know more details about who are the visitors to his site. This is a field required by the users of the Web as well as the stakeholders or owners of websites. There is a need to recognize patterns from a variety of data sources, and then interpret them using content mining, structure mining, and usage mining. This information can be transformed into actionable knowledge for redesigning the methods for data retrieval.

"In 1999, the World Wide Web was estimated to contain over 350 million pages with growth rate of about 1 million pages a day." In December, 2001, Google announced that it indexes 3 billion web documents. It is clear that documents on the Web have increased at a much higher rate than estimated, and the growth is still continuing. Web data not only includes the contents of that page, but also has a lot of reference data like how that page was accessed by users, HTML or XML codes for that page, and other information stored in cookies.