(Posted by Jarid Lukin, Director of E-Commerce, Alacra)
This week, Alacra sponsored WebSearchU, a conference run by Information Today targeted to "power" web searchers such as librarians and independent information professionals. As part of the event, I presented a case study on Searching For Premium Content (pdf). Contrary to popular belief, not all online content can be found on Google (or Yahoo or MSN), especially premium content like investment research and market research. As I mentioned in the talk, there are several reasons for this:
- "Deep Web" content is not accessible
Search engine crawlers can't access all of the content that's behind logins and firewalls. Yahoo tried to solve this with Yahoo Search Subscriptions but it has not had success mainly because Yahoo has just a handful of sources and you needed to have individual subscriptions to each source in order to access the content. - PageRank™ doesn’t work for premium content
Inbound links are a big factor in the search engine's ranking algorithms. However, premium publishers don't link to other competitors' content. For example, when Moody's comes out with a financial reporting assessment on General Motors, S&P isn't going to link to it. Furthermore, the timeliness of the content is not heavily weighted in the algorithms, so you're just as likely to get old content as new content. - User Interface design limitations
The beauty of Google is its simplicity. However, as the recent Ask.com commercials have pointed out, Google doesn't give you the tools to narrow down your search results. So, if the content you're looking for is not in the top 10 results, odds are you're not going to find it. Therefore, business searchers need to be able to continuously refine their search criteria to narrow down the search results by publisher, date, category, price, etc. - Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics
Lastly, like it or not, search engine results are still subject to manipulation by SEO techniques. So, marketers can influence which content ranks well. The marketers could be pushing older content, more expensive content, etc. As much as we try not to think about it, this leads to biased results based on who has the best SEO.
The key takeaway from the presentation is that Google and the other major search engines are consumer search engines. They do an excellent job at serving relevant results (and advertisements) to consumers. However, there is a gap in the market when it comes to meeting business searchers' needs of finding premium content. With over 200 million premium reports (and no subscription fees), we feel that the Alacra Store is a great place to start filling that premium content gap.
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