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

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.

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.

Informa takes Datamonitor over

Nicolas — Fri, 18 May 2007 17:36:00 +0200

The market research industry is quickly changing ( and consolidating) this last weeks !

Two weeks after aggregators, (We made a post recently regarding the acquisition of Profound - TBI by Marketresearch), two publishers are making the headlines today.

Informa takes Datamonitor over, for the humble sum of $ 1 billion ! Whouou!!! Well, we can consider that Datamonitor business model is stable, that a important part of their revenues are based on subscription (if anyone can give us more information about that, we would really appreciate !!)

Synergy must be really significant between these two organisations to reach such a price. Here are two of them that seems obvious to me : - Both of them are targeting Fortunes 500 companies - They are not covering the same industries

If you are publishing or distributing industry reports, keep a eye on our blog ! We will keep you informed about next operations. And do you know what ? I bet this will involve web 3.0 information specialists, such as Reportlinker….

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.