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

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 ?

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 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 - ........

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.

French bloggers give their opinion on Reportlinker

Nicolas — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 22:58:00 +0200

Last week, several bloggers gave their opinion on our service.

Chauffeur de Buzz tried our tool, and considers that the open access market research reports we propose on Retailing and Food Industry are really interesting
Marketing Digital judges that our vertical search engine will allow information professionals to increase the efficiency of their research on the Internet
Adscriptor is a blog dedicated to vertical search engine. For him, results are evidentiary. He also added comments on our search technology, which he compares to Google CSE. This is not my point of view, and I know Reportlinker very well !! Jean Marie forgot to speak about the semantic dimension of our search engine.

Out in house technology allows :

Deep web crawling and indexing technology (5 years of R&D with the support of ANVAR)
Full text and contextual search engine working on a distributed index of 1,2 Terra octets (6 engineers full time during 18 months)

Reportlinker announces the first search engine dedicated to open access market research reports

Nicolas — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 22:39:00 +0200

Reportlinker is a vertical search engine dedicated to open access market research reports. On a single screen, it gathers more than 1,2 million reports, published by trusted sources (governments, embassies, national statistics agencies, trade unions…).

The inadequacy of general public tools when searching for open access industry information The launch of Reportlinker is related to a common matter: how to quickly find and access relevant information using general public tools? General public tools promote merchant content, boosted by search marketing (SM) and search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, making relevant open access information more difficult to find.

Reportlinker: the professional market research engine makes the difference Reportlinker differentiation relies on its specialization in open access market research reports. User can now search the long tail of free market research without the noise of not so relevant merchant results. The professional research engine also includes in its index many results from the deep web that are not even accessible through general search engines. More than 1,2 million public reports, published by trusted sources, are now available in just a few clicks.

Reportlinker helps information researcher to improve efficiency and reduce costs by organizing and facilitating search for open access industry reports

• Reducing noise with results 100% dedicated to market research information: More than 1,2 million documents and reports aggregated from 200,000 high quality public sources (governments, embassies, trade unions…)

• Hard to find documents gathered in one place Reportlinker facilitates search for hard to find open access industry reports by concentrating highly fragmented sources on a single screen. Most of them are not even indexed by well known search engines.

Who should subscribe to Reportlinker? Information professionals, decision makers and entrepreneurs who search for structured analysis, like market reports or strategic information regarding their industry. Reportlinker is a subscription based search engine available from EUR 249 / month (www.reporltinker.com).

About Reportlinker Reportlinker is powered by Ubiquick, a technology company which develops and markets industry vertical search tools since January 2001 to 85,000 clients world wide.

For more information: Reportlinker Benjamin Carpano bca@reportlinker.com 97 Rue Racine 69 100 Villeurbanne France Tel : +33 4 37 37 16 37 Fax : +33 4 37 37 15 56

http://www.reportlinker.com