Reportlinker's blog : Web 3.0, Vertical Search, Information Industry and Market Research News - Web 3.0

How Web 3.0 new search services help information professionals mining the web for valuable open access information ? 2/2

Nicolas — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 16:10:00 +0100

We are uploading for our readers chapter extracted from an conference of the 2007 Online Information Show. The last chapter is here : How Web 3.0 new search services help information professionals mining the web for valuable open access information ?

Web 3.0 Search Services : from open access information to business quality content

Vertical search engines also appear in the information industry. Using free content, they are modifying the competitive landscape. Two examples are presented hereafter :

Reportlinker.com : this search engine launched in the beginning of 2007 gather public domain industry reports published by 200 000 sources
Zoominfo : launched in its new version in 2006, Zoominfo use information published in press release and “born on the web” content (ex : blog) to create company and executives profiles

Search for open access industry report : Reportlinker.com

What is Reportlinker ?

Reportlinker.com is a vertical search engine dedicated to public domain industry information.

1,2 Million of public documents such as annual reports or industry statistics and market reports are centralized from 200 000 sources selected for their Industry experience (governments, embassies, trade unions…).

How does it work ?

Reportlinker.com is working as a general search engine, but choose to crawl selected sources instead of trying to get most of them. Each document identified is analyzed through a in house semantic technology, through three steps :

the first one will rate the document on three dimensions : Industry, Geographic and Business (marketing, finance….)
the second will extract industry specific concept, as company names
a last treatment is applied in order to extract the document meta data : publication date, title….;

Business Model

Reportlinker is a subscription based search engine (daily or monthly access).

Example of search on Automotive Industry

1st step : Type “Passenger Cars” in the search engine box

2nd step : Refine the search thanks to industry filters

1/ Among automatic filters (on the left), three of them can be interesting : - Industries filter o Cars, that we will choose to refine here - Locations filter o We will reduce our search to Western Europe - Dates filter o We will choose to get all reports published from 2006

2/ When we look at the refined results list, the third and forth results are report on passengers cars in Europe. We download the first one, get a report from the CCFA (French Automotive Trade Union), published in November 2006, and giving insight on the French, European and worldwide automotive market. - This search lasted less than 10 minutes

Search for company profiles: Zoominfo.com

What is Zoominfo ?

ZoomInfo is a business information search engine used to quickly find information about industries, companies, people, products and services

How does it work ?

Zoominfo semantic search technology continually crawls the Business Web – the millions of company websites, news feeds and other online sources -- and extracts business information using natural language processing and extraction algorithms. ZoomInfo then automatically organizes the information into profiles. ZoomInfo also allows users to edit existing profile information or to add new profiles.

Business Model

If a first level of information is available for free on their website, advanced features such as “power search” are accessible on subscription.

Example of search on Ford

1st Step : Type “Ford” in Zoominfo search engine

2nd Step : Refine your search by Geography (if necessary)

You access here a complete company profile in less than 5 minutes

How Web 3.0 new search services help information professionals mining the web for valuable open access information ? 1/2

Nicolas — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 15:21:00 +0100

We are uploading for our readers chapter extracted from an conference of the 2007 Online Information Show. The last chapter is on hos way : How Web 3.0 new search services help information professionals mining the web for valuable open access information ?

This great amount of information make specific content identification more and more difficult as today’s search engine approach is general and exhaustive. Content identification on Google or MSN is based on keywords correspondence.

Moreover, the first ranks of their organic list of results are filled in by merchant content. Slowly but surely, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategies did their job making more difficult for user to find information that nobody has been promoted.

In 5 years, average length of business information searches on the Internet get 40 % longer Outsell Inc says. This evolution made to the detriment of analysis time has an estimated costs for the companies of € 300 M worldwide.

The birth of tools allowing identification and diffusion of business information is a natural consequence of today’s situation, and is necessary for every company, however large it may be (Multinational or SME).

Specialised search engines, such as vertical ones, were the first one to simplify their index. They choose to cover a restricted scope of information, but with much better search features that can offer any generalist search engine.

We will present today their main features and identify technologies. We will present two of these new search engines in the business information market (Zoominfo and Reportlinker) next week.

A/ Why are vertical search engines emerging ?

If the amount of information published over the Internet is more and more important, it is also more and more fragmented. Each piece of information has a limited value compared to the value of each of them linked together.

So the understanding that a vertical search engine has from its environment allows it a sharp exploitation of semantic technologies, to offer users genuine and innovative added-value services.

Specific information processing is done to fit their vertical features :

Index visible and invisible web
Analyze and extract each vertical specific concept (company names, market segment, executives names…)
Information made uniform from heterogeneous sources

Vertical search engines aim at addressing homogeneous users’ needs (business executives search, industry reports search..) and create value-added services from their knowledge of restricted users scope of expectations.

That’s the best formula to reduce search time from Internet users. In doing so, they provide users friendly application that allows users to more efficiently mine the web for value added information.

B/ Vertical search engines features and technologies : One vertical axis, three features

Vertical search engines offer 3 mains features : a vertical index, vertical search features and a vertical contextualisation tools

C/ The semantic is back to the hearth of the Internet

Three technologies characterize web 3.0 search engines : Semantic, Thesaurus and Concept Extraction.

Semantic Search Engine :

“A semantic search engine is a search engine that takes the sense of a word as a factor in its ranking algorithm or offers the user a choice as to the sense of a word or phrase.”

Taking care of the meaning of a text corpus, semantic analyses enable the pre-treatment and filtering of search results :

Search results clustering into thematic categories (categorization)
Automatically adds tags to document description
Displays additional stories linked to the document, even when the same keywords are not present

Semantic technologies play a very important role into vertical search engines as it allows to precisely organise the information among a finished number of dimensions.

For instance Farechase.com, the travel search engine, organise its result among the following dimensions :

Prices
Airlines
Departure Time
Flight duration
Direct flight or not

A sharp management of document context is almost impossible in a general search engine as it would be necessary to create as many index as specific point of views users would like to have to analyze data (example : Webfountain Technology from IBM).

Thesaurus

Thesaurus Semantic analyses are based on thesaurus, a structured organisation of keywords. Thesaurus building and management will allow the definition of a semantic dimension of a document. This structured organisation is hierarchic, but also transversal. Link between concepts is established in thesaurus. That's how general sense of a document is understood by artificial intelligence.

Concept extraction

Semantic technologies are able to automatically recognize and extract concepts, based on different elements of a sentence : syntax, grammar, meaning, context... Thus, it is able to recognize specific entities, such as : - date - place - people - company - ........

Methodology step by step : How to find out Automotive market reports n the Internet without Reportlinker.com

Nicolas — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 19:51:00 +0200

As explained we are uploading for our readers chapter extracted from an conference of the 2007 Online Information Show in December. We will present you a methodology step by step to identify Automotive market research on the European Market, without using Reportlinker.com

1/ Identify who can produce information you are looking for

You have two different ways to begin your search :

if you know the type of information you are looking for (company, country or industry), just refer to the chapter 1C of the present paper
if you prefer to search directly by country, then I advise you to use the Statbel website (http://statbel.fgov.be/port/cou_en.asp). Statbel is the main official statistical institution in Belgium and offers a detailed directory of websites giving figures and facts about every country in the world.

2/ Let the web inspire your industry keywords list

Where can you find market research vocabulary ? Inside market publications of course !

You can use any news aggregator, such as Google news, launch the query “Automotive market”, and read the first articles. I extracted on the first article I found the following keywords :

car sales
new passenger cars
Volkswagen
passenger market
Light Commercial Vehicle segment
new car market

You can also use any market research aggregator like Allbizreport and look into the table of content made of keywords you can use.

3/ The three most important components of your query to identify Market Research

Three elements compose the semantic of any market research :

the industry keywords
the geographical keywords
the dates

Thus, using the first keyword we identified previously, here is the query you will be launching : “car sales” + “Western Europe” + 2007

4/ Type a query and limit it to file format

The best thing to do is to begin by limiting search to a specific file format. That can help you to easily identify who is publishing documents answering your question.

In our case, we posted the following query to Google (05/09/07)

“car sales” + Western Europe + 2007 europe filetype:pdf

5/ Type a query and limit it to one domain

Obviously, the first results are coming from a website publishing regularly information on the European Automotive Market. To be more efficient, it is possible to limit your searches to this website, by typing the following query :

“car sales” + Western Europe + 2007 europe filetype:pdf site:www.acea.be

You will get here 5 results. Among them you will find the 2006 European Automotive Industry Report and 2007 first semester statistics by market and manufacturer.

6/ Relaunch your query with a new keyword

Now that you have information on sales, you can begin to search for information on player’s strategy

The best source for that is definitely the annual report (See chapter 1C).

To quickly get the best page, just type a query such as

"VOLKSWAGEN AG" "investor relations"

You are redirected to : http://www.volkswagenag.com/vwag/vwcorp/content/en/investor_relations.html

Now you can play in limiting your queries to this specific domain, as for example :

site:http://www.volkswagenag.com strategy 2007 filetype:pdf

In that case, the first two results are presentations made during “The Detroit Auto Show” and a Deutsche Bank conference. Each of them gives insight into the group global strategy, roadmap for the group objectives and outlook by market.

Advantages and Limits of business information research through general search engine

Information professional can gain time in several steps of the methodology we presented in this chapter.

In querying a single source of data, and using filters dedicated to the industry they are studying
In assessing the content they identify, through sources certifying the type of content they will find

The very last Vertical Search Engine, also called “Web 3.0” can help them to spare time, and assure the same level of information. We will present you now how this search engines are querying the web database to bring users the very best public content available.

How to search, identify and evaluate valuable open access industry information ?

Nicolas — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 21:16:00 +0200

As explained we are uploading for our readers chapter extracted from an conference of the 2007 Online Show in December. We will present you How to search, identify and evaluate valuable open access industry information ?.

Nowadays, general search engines such as Google or Yahoo! favour, despite them, merchant contents to the detriment of free contents.

Off the shelves reports brochures (such as Datamonitor) manage to get high rankings within search engine results. This is the consequence of their deep knowledge and practice of Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization, and their collaboration with Webmarketing Agencies.

As a consequence, free reports are more and more difficult to identify, because mostly relegated in the deep results pages. And this happens despite the fact that they are many more private reports.

In this newchapter, we propose you a step by step methodology, allowing you to get the best from the search engine, and to identify these free reports.

The 2 most important functions that can help you to easily identify free market reports on the Internet

Limit the search to a domain Possible on Google, Yahoo, Live
Limit the search to major format (Pdf, Doc, Ppt) : Possible on Google, Yahoo, not possible on Live

How to limit a search to a domain ?

On Google

Google offers the possibility to use the Boolean operator “Site:”

If you include site: in your query, Google will restrict the results to those websites in the given domain. For instance, automotive industry site:www.oecd.org will find pages about automotive industry within www.oecd.org. help site:com will find pages about help within .com urls. Note there can be no space between the site: and the domain.

This functionality is also available through Google Advanced Search page , under Advanced Web Search > Domains

On Yahoo!

The usage is definitely the same, but you still can change few options :

limit search to specific domain suffix
search multiple domain is at the same time (which will make you gain a lot of time)

Here are instruction from Yahoo ! help menu

''The site/domain yahoo! Advanced search option Restrict your search to sites with a specific domain suffix, such as .com, .edu, or .gov. For example, if you'd like to search only web sites of non-commercial organizations, click the radio button and select ".org" from the pull-down menu. To specify more than one domain, or one not listed in the drop-down menu, click the upper radio button and type the domains into the text field, separated by commas. You can also use this field to search within a particular web site, such as yahoo.com.''

You can also directly use the operator “site:” to find all documents within a particular domain and all its subdomains. operator on Yahoo! search box.

On Live

Using advanced search function on Live is more complicated than through its competitors websites. You can create a search query by adding or excluding terms or other parameters that narrow your search. But you have to launch the query first, and then add the criteria clicking on the advanced search link.

''Type the web address in the text box, select an option, and then click Add to search. You can specify any of the following: * Websites such as Microsoft.com * Root domains such as .edu, .gov, .com, .net, or .org * Country or region-specific domains such as .ca, .co, .uk, or .de''

How to limit a search to some specific document format ?

Limiting the document format have two advantages :

limiting the number of results you have to evaluate
most of the market research reports published on the Internet have been converted into pdf format, as a universal format

On Google

The operator “filetype:” followed by pdf, ppt or doc (for respectively pdf, power point presentation and word document) will allow you to specify the file format you would like in your results.

This function is also available on the advanced search box, through the option “File format”

On Yahoo!

You can choose to restrict your search by a specific file type, other than the default settings (all file-types). Currently supported formats are:

.htm, .html—Standard HTML
.pdf—Adobe PDF
.xls—Microsoft Excel
.ppt—Microsoft PowerPoint
.doc—Microsoft Word
.xml, .rdf, .rss—RSS or XML feeds
.txt—Plain Text Format

This option is only possible on Yahoo! Advanced Search box

Why is information valuable for business research needs ?

Nicolas — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 15:13:00 +0200

As explained we are uploading for our readers chapter extracted from an conference of the 2007 Online Show in December. We will present you why the open access market research reports are valuable for business research needs ?.

This is part of the public service mission to provide statistics. Being published by governing bodies, state, regional or local authorities, these types of information have the peculiarity to be “primary”, which means that public publishers are the first to provide them in the information distribution value chain.

Moreover, they cover a wide range of industries (not only major ones but also niches), as editorial choices are not guided by commercial aspect.

At last, public domain information are most of the time unbiased.

As a consequence, private reports are massively based on public information, even if they are completed by desk researches and analysis.

The time frame for private publishers to include public data in their reports increase the time-lag between public and private reports publishing. Public reports are thus more relevant.

Basically, each of them has its own characteristics. We will present them here one by one.

Public Domain Reports

National Statistics

What for ?

To forecast trade, and local sales

Where is it possible to find some ?

For National Statistics, JPMorgan published in July 2004 the “Global Data Watch Handbook”

Chamber of Commerce and Trade Union also publish Trade Statistics and Local Statistics ( Regional Reports)

http://www.chamberfind.com/ is a worldwide directory of Chamber of Commerce
I haven’t find any for Trade Union yet. If someone knows one… It would be grateful to send us its URL !

Feedbacks

Often difficult to analysis them as a single indicator, much more readable in a long term analyze.

Embassy Reports

What for ?

To assess an industry investment climate in a foreign country

Where is it possible to find some ?

http://www.embassyworld.com/ will help you for each country to find local Consulate or Embassy.

Feedbacks

They are often very good indicators for a first investigation on a country investment climate. Definitely not enough to make decision. Thus, embassies propose ad-hoc services for that purpose.

Evaluation Reports

What for ?

To get a deep insight into a market competition, and a detailed presentation of each player (market position, market shares, pricing policy, distribution …) Evaluation reports are prepared by Competition Commission to prevent conflicts when leading companies merge.

Where is it possible to find some ?

http://www.clubi.ie/competition/compframesite/WorldsBiggestAntiTrustSitesList.html

Feedbacks

While they are amazingly detailed, they are never updated, and thus quickly outdated.

Trade statistics

Refer to National Statistics

Customs Data

What for ?

To identify new trade opportunities for your products across the world; to measure market share; to identify growth areas; to forecast trade and to analyze patterns.

Where is it possible to find some ?

http://www.wcoomd.org/ie/index.html will help you to find out the customs website of the country you are researching.

Feedbacks

That’s sometimes difficult to query the customs website, and even more to understand how to analyze the raw data.

Country Reports

What for ?

To get the latest available demographic, socio-economic, political data related to a specific country.

Where is it possible to find some ?

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/ : The CIA factbooks is continually updated. It is also possible to directly use the National Statistics Institute of the country you are researching. For that, you can use this directory : http://www.insee.fr/en/liens/liens_pays.htm

Feedbacks

The CIA website is one of the most up-to-date database for country intelligence.

Demographic and Social Reports

Refer to country reports

Official Business register

What for ?

Get the latest players financial statement, their status (who are the shareholders), the number and localisation of offices.

Where is it possible to find some ?

Each country has its own National Business Register

Feedbacks

Not always free, this depends on the countries. Moreover, in some countries the law does not oblige the companies to publish this information.

Patent and trademark information

What for ?

Follow the topics on which players are increasing their R&D efforts, identify new technologies.

Where is it possible to find some ?

The University of Washington Engineering Library publish a bookmark of available websites : http://www.lib.washington.edu/engineering/ptdl/

Google also, and that is free : http://www.google.com/patents

Feedbacks

For novices, it is difficult to understand and analyze each information included in a patent.

Private Reports

Annual Reports and Investor Presentation

What for ?

To get latest data, general strategy and business units year review

Where is it possible to find some ?

Some websites aggregate Annual Reports, that one can access when registering the website for free. Nevertheless, the easiest way is to refer to the company financial corporate website pages.

Two kinds of reports are usually available. When Annual Reports can be difficult to read for non experts, Investor presentations often give easy to understand information on the company, its competitor and their markets.

Feedbacks

Annual reports are limited to listed companies. They are probably the best free document available, nevertheless, readers must keep in mind that this document also aims at seducing new investors.

Analyst Research Reports

What for ?

To get the latest data on a company, and a synthesis of a financial expert short and middle term analysis

Multex analysis : “Broker research is written by equity analysts that have deep expertise in the sectors, or companies they follow. This expertise allows them to make well informed predictions as to how the company or sector will develop in the future.”

Analyst research are provided by independent research, not attached to particular deals or trading positions, thus unbiased.

Where is it possible to find some ?

This is the most atomised type of content, thus often quite difficult to find a single source.

Feedbacks

Very difficult to identify when you expect them for free !

Bank Research Papers

What for ?

A wide scope of Bank Research are available online : industry reports, country reports… The markets and countries they are covering vary strongly. Impossible to know if a report will be identified before searching each website one by one. Moreover, no service centralizes their publications.

Where is it possible to find some ?

This can be difficult. Bank Research Papers can be reserved to bank’s clients. Nevertheless, a blog used to take inventory of main bank research website (http://www.bankresearch.org/). This website has not been updated since May 2007.

Feedbacks

Probably the best free business content available.

Press Release

What for ?

To follow company’s current events : new product release, merger, changes in management….

Where is it possible to find some ?

Several players on the market aggregate press releases. Leaders are Business Wire (http://www.businesswire.com/) and PR Newswire (http://www.prnewswire.com/).

Feedbacks

A press release alone is far away from being enough. And one must be careful when using them, as this is corporate communication.

White papers

What for ?

To follow a competitor product or service White papers are a promotional tool companies published to present a player solution. Usually, they are illustrated by a client’s case study.

Where is it possible to find some ?

http://www.itpapers.com/ gather on its website white papers limited to the IT Industry.

Feedbacks

Corporate communication. Mainly used in the information technologies markets.

As a conclusion, we have seen here how precious public industry information are. But such a diversity of content and diversity of sources is not always helpful to information professional.

To gain time, and efficiency, we will present you now a methodology to easily identify these contents over the Internet.

Who produces and publishes open access content ?

Nicolas — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 14:03:00 +0200

As explained last week, we are uploading for our readers chapter extracted from an conference of the 2007 Online Show in December. We will present you what are the so called “open access market research reports” and who is publishing them.

Nowadays, large Anglo Saxon and American groups such as Dun and Bradstreet, Factiva or Thomson Corp dominate the business information market. These players were born during the first wave of industry information providers. Launched in the early 80’s, they focus on financial and economic information aggregation. Their database, accessible by subscription, mainly targets Fortune 1000 and multinational corporations.

Beside these giants around which the information industry gets structured, the market is completely atomised. His peculiarity is the large number of private publishers. This is especially true on the market research segment. Most famous ones are Datamonitor or Euromonitor. These last distribute reports sold from € 1500 to 3000. Outsell estimates companies will spend more than € 12 Billion in 2010 in market research reports purchasing. This market grows by 11% a year in average.

These publishers’ global offer is estimated to 150 000 documents. Specialized in distance selling, they make a great usage of opportunities offered by Internet Search Engine for their document promotion. They also distribute their content trough market research aggregator, such as Reportlinker.com in Europe or Marketresearch.com in the USA. This last, worldwide leader, references approximately 100 000 documents.

But the Internet is full of treasures. Apart form these reports, many free market research reports are published on the Internet, by public organisations such as Embassies, Ministries or Trade Unions. We estimate than 10 million of these free reports are available online today.

Definition : What do we call Open Access Content dedicated to business research ?

Wikipedia defines the “Open access (OA) as immediate, free and unrestricted online access to digital (…) material, primarily peer-reviewed research articles in journals.”

OA content business research can be described as:

Information published for free on the Internet
Information giving insight into markets or industries, countries or companies
Information that has been structured and documented : source, date, author….

We can divide the Open Access Business Information into two categories :

1/Public Domain Information

The public domain information are the so called “Public Sector Information” (PSI).
Definition of “public sector body” given in the Mepsir report (June 2006) : The definition of “public sector body” is taken from Directive 92/50/EEC as “State, regional or local authorities, bodies governed by public law, associations formed by one or more of such authorities or bodies governed by public law” where “Body governed by public law” means “Any body that is established for the specific purpose of meeting needs in the general interest, not having an industrial or commercial character, and having legal personality and financed, for the most part, by the State, or regional or local authorities, or other bodies governed by public law; or subject to management supervision by those bodies; or having an administrative, managerial or supervisory board, more than half of whose members are appointed by the State, regional or local authorities or by other bodies governed by public law”.

2/Private Papers

The private paper can also be defined as …..all the other documents !!
Business information published by private companies to promote their services companies or know-how (Analyst research reports, Annual Reports…)

Which kind of open access content can you find on the Internet ?

Ubiquick estimates that more than 10 Million free industry reports are available on the Internet. Obviously, and for commercial reasons, most of them are published by organisation financed by States. But publishing information on a sector can also be a promotional tool for many private companies.

Type and Source for Open Access Industry Information

1/ Type

Annual Reports
Press Releases (?)
White Papers
Investment reports
Country reports
Economic indicators
Trade Statistics
Patent and trademarks information

2/ Source

Embassy
National Institute
Competition Commission
Ministry
Local representation of state / federation
Trade Union
Customs
National and Central Bank
International Institutions
Stock exchange
Consulting firm
Banks
Chamber of Commerce

Summary : Type of public domain information by sources

Web 3.0 : From Open Access Content to Quality Business Information

Nicolas — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 16:27:00 +0200

The Online Information 2007, the world's leading event for online content and information management solutions, will begin on the 4th of December. Reportlinker will exhibit, and speak Thursday 6 December (14.00-15.30) during a session called "Managing enterprise information Search - is there any innovation left?"

We will present their the content of a paper we are publishing on our blog. You will find here today our introduction.

In a more and more competitive business environment, companies need :

To find precise, recent and validated business information
To access them as quick as possible

The amount of open access industry information published by public and authoritative sources has been exploding for several years. More than 200.000 sources such as Governments, Embassies, Public agencies, Investment agencies, Banks, Industry clusters, Trade unions... are now publishing open access market statistics, forecasts and analyses and make them available for free on the world wild web.

Though they exist in great quantity, these pieces of information are not so easy to retrieve. Private publishers and industry information analysts spend many efforts and money to trust the first places of Google and every other general search engines. Open access content thus becomes invisible. As a consequence, Information professionals need to spend more time and elaborate complex search strategies to find information (Outsell reports that search time increased by 40 % in 5 years). Our paper aims at presenting strategies and tools to easily identify and access valuable open access content to serve business research needs.

1/ Who produces free industry reports on the Internet ? Why ? Can you trust open access market research and industry statistics ? We will present here who are the main open access information providers. Attendees will learn here why they can trust most of them, and how to assess the others ?

2/ Learn how to search and identify valuable open access industry information . Using specific queries, boolean operators or even advanced search box allow professionals to easily identify open access content through general search engines. Using invisible web and public information aggregators can also save time. Attendees will learn here where to search for Open Access Industry Reports on the Internet ? What kind of search strategy will help them to more efficiently retrieve them ?

3/ How the Web 3.0 and new generation search engines can help you finding valuable industry information ?

A new generation of vertical search engines is born. Each of them follow the web 3.0 trend. They serve vertical users needs such as airline tickets search, personal and company search, or industry report search. These new generation of search engines creates added value services from public free information gathered on the open web. We will define here the web 3.0, present the technologies that will change the web, and explain some leading business models.

Business models of the Web 3.0 landscape

Ben — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 11:32:00 +0200

This post follows my previous post From general search engine to value-added vertical search services.

Below, I'm discussing some of the business models that are generally involved in Web 3.0 services

B2B Web 3.0 Services

People Search

Zoominfo www.zoominfo.com

Business Model : Subscription

Revenues : $10 M, 1 600 subscribers. Yearly Subscription from $ 5 000

"ZoomInfo is the best destination for information about people and companies. Our product is a summarization search engine that finds, understands, extracts and summarizes Information about people and companies on the Web."

Generate www.generateinc.com

Business Model : Subscription

"Generate's mission is to deliver the next generation business intelligence platform. We apply technology in new ways to solve the fundamental problem of putting essential information about companies, news, executives and relationships in a single view and making it easy to act on that information."

Engineering

GlobalSpec www.globalspec.com

Business Model : Subscription and Ad

Revenues : $11,4 M, 1 500 subscribers Yearly Subscription between $ 7 k and $60 k

“For industrial sector suppliers, GlobalSpec creates exceptionally strong value by offering a complete Internet marketing solution - a broad, cost-effective marketing channel for suppliers to reach potential customers in their target industries.”

B2C Web 3.0 Services

Travel

Farecast www.farecast.com

Business Model : Ad

“Farecast.com is the first airfare prediction website. We help online travel shoppers save money by answering the question; should you buy now or wait?”

Farechase www.farechase.com

Business Model : Ad

“Farechase, Inc. is the leading provider of real-time Web automation technology for the travel industry. Established in 1999, the management team consists of Lior Delgo, President; Ofer Shaked, CTO; Boaz Behar, VP, R&D, and Krista Pappas, Senior Vice President.”

Mobissimo www.mobissimo.com

Business Model : Ad

Revenues : $ 5M

“Mobissimo is the ultimate travel search engine with a simple mission: improve the way people seek and discover travel information. The Mobissimo search engine performs real-time queries of the multiple websites that travelers traditionally check manually”

Blogs

Technorati www.technorati.com

Business Model : Ad

“Technorati provides search and notification services for active content on the World Live WebTM. We monitor over 1.8 million sources (weblogs, RSS) with over 10,000 new sources added each day, all with a median index update time of under 9 minutes.”

PodCasts

Pluggd www.pluggd.com

Business Model : Ad

“Pluggd was founded in February 2006 with the goal of making it easier for people to discover, experience, and share online audio and video programming (often called 'podcasts.') Our website is an aggregation of both traditional media and independent online-only producers. We've built great tools to help you find what you want, based on topics of interest, popularity, and critical acclaim.”

Technologies implemented in Web 3.0 services

Ben — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 11:18:00 +0200

This post follow my previous post From general search engine to value-added vertical search services. Below, I'm discussing some of the technologies that are generally implemented in Web 3.0 services.

Semantic Search Engine Definition :

“A semantic search engine is a search engine that takes the sense of a word as a factor in its ranking algorithm or offers the user a choice as to the sense of a word or phrase.”

Taking care of the meaning of a text corpus, semantic analyses enable the pre-treatment and filtering of search results :

- Search results clustering into thematic categories (categorization)

- Automatically adds tags to document description

- Displays additional stories linked to the document, even when the same keywords are not present

Semantic technologies play a very important role into vertical search engines as it allow to precisely organise the information among a finished number of dimension.

For instance Farechase.com, the travel search engine, organise its result among the following dimension : - Prices - Airlines - Departure Time - Flight duration - Direct flight or not

A sharp management of document context is almost impossible in a general search engine as it would be necessary to create as many index as specific point of views users would like to have to analyse data (example : Webfountain Technology from IBM).

Thesaurus Semantic analyses are based on thesaurus, a structured organisation of keywords. Thesaurus building and management will allow the definition of a semantic dimension of a document.

This structured organisation is hierarchic, but also transversal. Link between concepts is established in thesaurus. That's how general sense of a document is understood by artificial intelligence.

Concept extraction Semantic technologies is able to automatically recognise and extract concepts, based on different elements of a sentence : syntax, grammar, meaning, context... Thus, it is able to recognise specific entities, such as : - date - place - people - company - ........

From general search engine to value-added vertical search services

Ben — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 10:53:00 +0200

Billions of pages that compose the WWW are growing faster and faster. Since a few months, this phenomenon has been speed up as social media democratisation (ex : blog) allows anyone to produce and broadcast content.
This great amount of information make specific content identification more and more difficult as today’s search engine approach is general and exhaustive. Content identification on Google or MSN is based on keywords correspondence.
Moreover, the first ranks of their organic list of results are now trusted by merchant content. Slowly but surely, earch Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimisation strategies did their job making more difficult for user to find information that nobody has been promoted.

1. At first there was The Semantic Web

Remedies exist. Tim Berners Lee imagined how it was possible to add "sense" to the search engine index. He recommended to use semantic. This was in 1999, another century in the WWW. Tim wanted to add a semantic layer on the search engine to facilitate links creation between documents, using concept tags (based on sense), rather than limiting this on hyperlinks, as Google does (the famous Page Rank).

“We are going from a Web of connected documents to a Web of connected data.” Nova Spivack, RADAR NETWORKS

This new approach also add another objective : reinforce the contextual dimension of information searching.
Documents will be classified and put into contexts. Those contexts will themselves be linked to other documents. This approach was known as “The Semantic Web”. Behind this idea, Tim thought that publishers and content producers would manually create tags allowing internet users to surf in a structured semantic universe. Latter, the social media and Web 2.0 revolution did the job : Bloggers create tags for the content they are publishing or Digg users manually describe with their own word each website they find interesting to share with others.
But this approach is making a lot of issues :
1/ For a perfect work, each publisher need to share and use the same universal and structured vision of the world in order to make sure to use same words for same concept.
2/ Each Publisher should be able, and willing (take the time to do it) to describe its content in each of its dimension
3/ SEO and SEM temptation will still be possible

For each of these reasons, the semantic web remains a concept, and its industrialisation, an utopia. Finally start-up reinvented this approach, under the Web 3.0 concept.
The principle is based on the automatic information processing using semantic search engines in order to extract concepts and to link them together. As long as this approach is automatic, this task can be spread to a wide amount of content, as this is not only the work of publishers or readers, as before.
We can take here some examples :

- Extract date from a document to place it on a time axis - Extract company names - Extract executive names and details - Extract places...

But to be really efficient, this approach should be done in a finished world. Web 3.0 will thus need to be vertical.

2. The born of Vertical search engine

A new generation of vertical search engine was born these last months. Each of them follow the web 3.0 trend. They address homogeneous users’ needs (airline tickets search, industry report search..) and create value-added services from public information gathered from the open web (and free, as a consequence).

1/ Vertical index
The specific approach of these engines allows them to build a specialized index, and to delete peripheral contents, not directly linked to the thematic. Doing so, they eliminate all the noise experienced in the general search engine.

EXAMPLE : Their specialization allow them to index document from the deep web, document that are not present in the general search engine results.

EXAMPLE : In the travel industry, recent search engine such as Sprice.com or Farechase.com automatically and simultaneously query numbers of airlines website to offer user the best prices without searching these websites one by one.

2/ Vertical search features
These new search engines also offer users search and filtering features dedicated to the specific needs they answer.
Travel Industry : Sprice.com allows users to compare airlines prices by amount, length, departure and arrival time, type of flight.....
Executive search : Zoominfo allows users to search among enterprise executive, by industry, geographic zone, company revenues ...
Consumer Electronics : Retrevo.com helps users to identify for each product (Mp3 reader..) each web resources by type (Documentation, consumer reviews...)
Market Research : Reportlinker.com allows users to identify open access market research and dynamically organizes them by industry, geographic zone, date... and to preview a document before downloading it.
Specific information processing is done to build these vertical features : - Index visible and invisible web - Analyse and extract each concept of each document in each of the dimension the user can search through the tool key features - Information uniformisation from heterogeneous sources

3/ Vertical context
Information contextualisation is the third axes if these value-added vertical search services. To generate new information, the idea is to extract and cross each piece of information with a different one, classified under the same concept.
EXAMPLE : Using press release, company website and other free Publication, Zoominfo automatically generate a genuine company profile.
The amount of information published over the internet is more and more important, but also more and more fragmented. Each piece of information has a limited value compared to the value of each of them linked together. So the understanding that each Web 3.0 search engine has from its environment allow them a sharp exploitation of semantic technologies, to offer user genuine and innovative added-value services.

Irish researcher annonunce super-fast RDF search engine

Nicolas — Fri, 11 May 2007 18:14:00 +0200

A super-fast RDF search engine have been developed in Ireland. At least, that's what we can read from Electric News.

Professor Stefan Decker, director of DERI (Galway's Digital Enterprise Research Institute) is definitely enthusiastic about its team work. The importance of this breakthrough cannot be overestimated. These results enable us to create web search engines that really deliver answers instead of links. The technology also allows us to combine information from the web, for example the engine can list all partnerships of a company even if there is no single web page that lists all of them.

By the way, what is RDF ??? Wikipedia gives the following definition : Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications originally designed as a metadata model but which has come to be used as a general method of modeling information, through a variety of syntax formats.

RDF is often used for disseminating news article summaries and sharing weblog content. So this technologies will be able to gather information from deep web, link them together, and brong more sense to each piece of information, , as Reportlinkler does.

We are quite impatient to see how this technology will change the semantic search engine landscape. We will keep an eye on it !

Will the web 3.0 be the future of the search engine industry ?

Nicolas — Thu, 03 May 2007 23:20:00 +0200

Pandia search news published this week a very interesting interview of Andrew Goodman on the future of Google and the search engine industry. Andrew is the conference chairman of the forthcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in Toronto in June.

Without clearly naming it, Andrew gives different keys regarding the Web 3.0.

He explains where general search engine limits are, taking the example of the so called invisible web. We’re supposed to think that shining a light on all information is unproblematic, but of course it isn’t.

He also gives its opinion on how Google is setting up personalized search. Done right, it’s a natural extension of what search ought to be. The lite version of course simply orients results to likely intent, geography, etc.; it helps disambiguate queries.

But Andrew, as François Schiettecatte, is pointing privacy concern we can have through the way Google is personalizing search. Reportlinker, and new entrants in the web 3.0 in using tags provided by semantic technologies make easier the browsing through document without gathering users personal information.

We do not have much information on how google is doing (well, if anyone has, he still can leave a comment here !), but one thing is sure. Google "Big Brother" reputation will make them difficult to implement such technology !

The new semantic search engine strenghts

Nicolas — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 23:32:00 +0200

Red Herring published at the beggining of April an article called "First Semantic Search Engine?" The technology business newspaper is asking an essential question on the future of this market : Are the newcomers, such as Zoominfo or Reportlinker, the first ever semantic search engine ?

The answer is YES ! The new vertical search engine structures open access information already on the web, which is a true revolution. Industry leaders, such as Google and Yahoo are able to offer you the broadest database of results (12 Billion pages ??).... But soon, only search engine experts will be able to find out what they are looking for in this mountains of data, even if experts agree to say that Google is probably already using semantic technologies to improve quality of its results.

So basically, the first benefit to the use of semantic search engine is time sparing. That's definitely good news for CEO's ! Actually, time spending on research over the Internet for business purpose increased by 40 % between 2001 and 2006, Outsell Inc said. And this is time that professsionals won't use for analysis and decision purpose. To summarize, getting more information makes you less efficient.

This point of view is shared by a research team from Wright State University in Ohio. Developing a semantic search engine technology, the team is working on usage in the Healthcare industry, but also terrorism, defense, and financial services.

The strenght of this new generation of search engine is to allow users to identify information described in another way than they formulated it in their query : - HR professionals will identify best applicants - Doctor will idenitify potential danger of medecine usage - Information professionals will easily get open access industry reports.

Salesforce.com takes Koral over

Nicolas — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 22:12:00 +0200

A new deal has been closed in the Business Information 3.0 landscape. Salesforce.com recently acquires the start up Koral.

Salesforce.com suite CRM applications allows customers to manage and share all of their sales, support, and marketing information. The 29,800 customers and approximately 646,000 paying subscribers for whom Salesforce.com manages customer information, will now access content that Koral allow them to retrieve over the Internet.

All information about this deal can be found here.

The Business Information 3.0 is born. Reportlinker follows this trend.

Nicolas — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 17:39:00 +0200

John Blossom, Senior Analyst for Shore Communications Inc, wrote an excellent article about companies "Building Quality Business Content from the Web". John gives its opinion on the future of the information industry new entrants. According to John, Business Information 3.0 (Web 3.0 information industry companies) has been born. These companies use "born-on-the-Web content and technologies to create business information services that are several notches above previous efforts to glean quality information from Web sites and other key sources". They are modifying the competitive landscape, as John considers that leaders like Factiva, Hoover's, and others are not able to dive in the deep web to gather Open Access Information.

Two companies (Zoominfo and Generate Inc) are presented as an example. One can still tell John that he forgot to talk about Reportlinker !!

Article can be found here.

Reportlinker : the first web 3.0 search engine dedicated to market research reports

Nicolas — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 17:07:00 +0200

Sramana Mitra is one of the first expert giving a definition of the emerging Web 3.0 on her brillant strategy blog. Sramana insist on the web 3.0 formula : Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS).

For her, Web 3.0 :

3C = Content, Commerce, Community
4th C = Context
P = Personalization
VS = Vertical Search

You will read her post here.