AlacraBlog

Extended Customer Support Hours

Alacra now provides 24x5 customer support.  Sunday through Thursday nights, the New York office is covered from 5:00 PM until 1:00 AM and then we hand off to London where someone is in the office by 6:00 AM.  Our weekend coverage will continue to be from 9:00 AM in London until 5:00 PM in New York.

Why the expanded hours?  Many of our larger customers have research operations in India and we felt we needed to provide the same level of support for all customers regardless of location.  We also have an increasing number of customers in Asia and Australia, and many people on the west coast work past 8:00PM New York time, when our late night coverage used to end.

We typically get very high marks for our customer support; now all our customers can communicate with us by phone or email wherever they might be working.

More on The Alacra Store...

Between my post last week, Fred’s post on Monday, John Blossom, PaidContent, Michael Parekh and our press release yesterday, we’ve generated a lot of interest and questions about the Alacra Store.  So I thought I’d answer some questions and respond to some comments here.

1)      Better abstracts and/or keyword in context.  This is our top priority.  We need to give users as much information as possible about what they’re about to buy before they buy it.  The challenge is the varying amount and types of metadata we get from the publishers.  But we’re working on this now.  Ideally, we’d like to do “search inside this report.”

2)      Sort the results.  Also working on this.  On Google, users typically stop looking after the first page or two of results.  Our experience with business information searching is that searchers will look through lots of results for an answer to their question.  So we need to allow users to sort through results by date and price in addition to type of content which is deployed now.

3)      This stuff is expensive!  There are a number of reasons for this but the two most important are a) the publishers control the pricing and b) there’s an inverse correlation between high price and availability for free over the web.  We are very focused on aggregating content that is not available anywhere for free.  So while we will have lots of archival news stories (at relatively high prices) the Store will specialize in premium content that is not available elsewhere on a pay-per-view basis.

4)      Can’t bookmark search results pages.  We’ll fix this.

5)      Coverage isn’t that good, or, in other words, not enough content.  We have about 30 databases now, some of which are aggregated collections of trade publications such as SourceMedia.  We plan to add another dozen or so databases by the end of Q3 including Moody’s and FitchRatings and bunch more by the end of the year. 

John Blossom was spot-on in his analysis of what we’re trying to do:

The point is to provide a true browsing environment for business information consumers structured in a way that's likely to appeal to people looking for particular kinds of specialized business-oriented content for specific business and research purposes. Most importantly, most of the content is stuff that's REALLY not found on the Web, and it's generally easy to understand which is which via this tool.

The Alacra Store (beta) is Live!

Whatever you want to call it – the “deep web” or  the “invisible web” – there’s a tremendous amount of valuable information available via the internet that is only accessible to those who subscribe.  The Alacra Store (www.alacrastore.com) is going to make some of the invisible web visible by making content from about 30 premium databases accessible on a transaction basis by credit card.  Content from premium publishers such as D&B, CreditSights, Thomson Financial, Freedonia, Snapdata, Hemscott, SourceMedia and Datamonitor is currently available; we plan to add content from Leadership Directories, Moody’s, Fitch Ratings, the Economist Intelligence Unit and a handful of others in the next few weeks.  We still have some UI and design issues to resolve but we’re confident we’ll have them worked out soon. 

More on Tagging and Blog Search

Last week Fred Wilson had wrote about Posting, Subscribing and Tagging as the essential components of blogging. Tom Evslin was equally insightful posting Blog Changes: Taxonomy and Folksonomy which describes that tagging is all about “finding stuff.”  Michael Parekh followed up with On Why Tagging Is So Frickin’ Hard? which is comprehensive and right on the screws.  Strictly from the perspective of a knowledge worker or researcher, tagging and blog search are practically useless.  Pierre commented on my last post about applying some structured tags and auto-categorization to post to del.icio.us or Technorati.  In theory this could work, if a) everyone would agree on what the structure(s) should be and b) auto-categorization was automatically deployed.  This seems a long way off. 

Two interesting examples:

1)      Search Technorati for “term sheet” (be sure to use quotes) and you get back 427 posts.  Since Brad Feld uses “term sheet” as a tag, his excellent series of posts on term sheets appears on right in the del.icio.us and Furl links.  But I know Fred has had a few posts on terms sheets and these won’t show up until many pages into the Technorati results.  A tag search on Technorati yields 8 results, all but one of the Brad’s.  If you can’t find it, it doesn’t exist.

2)      Search Technorati for “class action” and there are 24,871 posts.  Only 12 posts are tagged “class action”.  If you get more specific and look for Vioxx class action, there are many posts tagged Vioxx, but they’re all blog spam – find a class action lawyer in any state who’s working on Vioxx.

There are many other examples.  At the point, tagging and using blog search is For Blogger Nerds Only.

More State of the Blogosphere

Dave Sifry, founder and CEO of blog search firm Technorati continues his State of Blogosphere report.  Part 1 covered Blog Growth, Part 2 covered Posting Volume and Part 3, posted yesterday, covers Tags & Tagging.   I am most interested in the Tags & Tagging coverage; I wanted to see if Dave had (or anyone else) some thoughts as to where this is all going.  But Dave said, "Of course, because the act of tagging is such a new thing, making predictions on where it will go in the future is anyone's guess. I believe that as long as the tagging system is set up to encourage accountability (e.g. link-based tags that are inside of a blog post) and discourage gaming, the folksonomy created will continue to provide useful in helping even non-bloggers to help view a more organized world."

The fact is that unfortunately, for business research, searching for tags doesn't work.  It's a combination of two factors - the blog search engines are covering too much and there isn't any consistency in business-specific tags.  I'll post some examples next week.

It’s All About Search

Not a day goes by without news about web search. Business Week covers the Google and Yahoo! talent grab this week. Search Engine Watch finds that results returned by the major engines are dramatically different than one would expect. The FT covered vertical search in detail a couple of weeks back and just wrote about local search. (must subscribe). Blog search is getting a lot of coverage now as the number of blogs continues to explode and blog search engine results  are consistently poor. Dave Sifry of Technorati provides blog growth statistics here. The number of blogs is doubling every 5 months.