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

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

An Interview of Reportlinker CEO

Nicolas — Thu, 31 May 2007 22:24:00 +0200

Decideurstv interviewed Benjamin Carpano last week. Ben gives its vision of Reportlinker, explains here how our search engine works, where the reports comes from, how to access the service... Interview is enclosed, for French speaker only. By the way, Horizon Entrepreneurs presents on their blog an interesting summary of the interview.

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 !

Knuru.com : New entrant in the business information search engine world

Nicolas — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 08:32:00 +0200

A new search engine recently appears on the Internet : knuru.com knuru.com defined himself as a free next generation knowledge resource for business information.

knuru philosophy is quite close to Reportlinker'one : help user to identify information that can be found in the overcrowded world of general search engine.

The interesting features of this search engine is the two tabs in which they sort their product : - strategic results - news results

They defintely follow the trends of Hakia and Google, that we described earlier in this blog. Nevertheless, one differciation axe appear, since they sign an agreement with The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. They now allow information professionals to search for source in the business knowledge center of the business school.

knuru can be accessed via a Partner websites network, via knuru.com and can also be accessed (via a downloadable application) by users of Microsoft Office via the Research button.