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

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.

The french magazine "L'entreprise" published in June a complete file on the French web entrepreneur. I was interwiewed, and presented our vision of the future of the search engine. Everything is enclosed here (in french).

Two bloggers make in June post linking to Reportlinker. Don't hesitate to visit their blog !

Robert Berkman, editor of "The Information Advisor" and of the Intelligent Agent Blog post a short article on Reportlinker at the beggining of June. Robert tried our services, that he considers as "a very significant development for market researchers and is an example of new types of open source document aggregation sites we may see in the near future."

Cedric Deniaud, author of the blog Internet, Webmarketing and Multimedia, wrote an article on todays Vertical search engine trends. Cedric took in this interesting synthesis the example of Reportlinker.

Just type a query on Google....

The competitive landscape of aggregator is at the same time simple to understand, and complex to define. The internal competition is really fierce, as you will see if you type a query on any general search engine.

Just try to type “China "Retail Industry" "market research” on Google for example.

If we analyse the results, we can see that aggregators also face the competition of :

• publishers, their providers who also directly sell online. In that example, Plunkettresearch ranks first.

• the other aggregators
  

1. Larger aggregators, with broad scope of industries covered (allbizreport.com in that example)
   

1. industry focused aggregators (Just-food.com in that example). These aggregators are focused on a single industry. Most of the time, they also provide access to industry news, organize summit and promote major events.
   

Main aggregators are summarized in the following table.

• Consulting firm

There is a huge difference between the expected results of an Ad Hoc research and an off-the shelves report, a difference of prices also. Ready-to-use reports are sold between 1500 and 5000 €, when a Ad Hoc research prices can be 10 times more expensive. But to provide their clients with the latest updated information, they are using multiclients reports to illustrate their work ! In our example, we made a screen shot from Google contextual ads.

• Governments and public sources, such as University (Washington University in that example), giving free access to their own publications
  

• At last, a large number of products can also satisfy client’s need for information (workshop, conference, press clipping...)
  
  

Who are the leading aggregators ??

As you can see in the previous table, less than 10 companies now manage one or more market research aggregators.

1/ The technology companies

Let’s first introduce us !! Ubiquick is a market leader in real-time web mining software. Our technologies enable you to connect, collect, and organise information from virtually any sources (web, intranet, application). We deliver these technologies through built-in online services, or as a licensed software. I let you guess what are our main force ! We sell reports through :

• Plusdetudes.com, French speaking catalog
• Allbizreport.com, English speaking market research catalog
• But also Reportlinker.com, which is the first website offering access at the same time to public and private reports
  

The Alacra Store is an e-commerce website offering consumers access to select reports from a host of Alacra premium databases. Searching the Alacra Store is free. You register to purchase and download reports with a credit card. Types of business information available include company fundamentals and financials, credit research, earnings estimates, economic data, filings, market and investment research and news. The Alacra company coverage includes more than 45,000 global public companies, 20,000 private issuers of public debt and 350,000 global private companies with more than $20 million in revenue or 200 employees.

The Alacra Store is a service of Alacra, Inc. Alacra is a leading global provider of business and financial information and solutions. A privately heldcompany founded in 1996, Alacra is headquartered in New York City. The company provides a diverse portfolio of authoritative databases along with proprietary solutions that enable clients to quickly find, analyze, package and present mission-critical business information.

Last interesting stuff : Alacrawiki a guide to business information companies, publishers and databases. Anyone can contribute, but you must create an account in order to do so.

2/ The service companies

Bharat Book Bureau facilitate and support all business information needs by providing the relevant information materials generated and published by global agencies on Core Industry (Automotive, Insurance, Banking and Finance, Shipping and Marine, Metals and Minerals, Oils and Gas etc.), Country Information, Technical and Management subjects, both in print and electronic format. These include Reports, Newsletters, Country and Company profile etc.

Bharat Book Bureau also propose ad hoc research to companies that did not find the information theyr are looking for in their database.

Dynamic technologies GmbH is the operator of reports-research.com, markt-studie.de and studio-mercado.es. Few information are available on this company. Basically, we can consider them as being really opportunist, as they open portal in language in which nobody was involved yet (German, Spanish). They also offer consulting services.

Global Information, Inc. (GII), which was established in 1984, has since emerged as the leading aggregator for market research products in the Eastern hemisphere. Based in the Greater Tokyo Area, GII has opened offices in Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Brussels, and the United States. The company provides continuous 24 hour service around the globe.

MarketResearch.com defined himself as the leading provider of global market intelligence products and services. This aggregator probably provides the broadest catalog with over 100,000 private research reports (well, don’t forget that Reportlinker.com offers the access to 1,2 M public reports). They grow last years in taking over two competitors, firstly Mindbranch in 2003, and TBI Profound this year. The company, that we can consider as an industry shaper, also publish reports through different branches, such as Kalorama or Packaged Facts, that they both acquired in 1998, or SBI.

Research and Markets are another source for international market research and market data. They currently hold over 80,000 major research publications from most of the leading publishers, consultants and analysts. Based in Ireland, and created in 2002, this company has been quickly growing thanks to good knowledge in the SEO field.