In 1999, long before Google became the dominant search engine it is today, Alacra launched a search engine called Portal B. The goal of Portal B was to provide better search results for business-oriented searches without advertising. The business model was that we would charge enterprises for the search engine and embed it in their intranet.
Why was Portal B better? We had our editorial team hand-select the 40,000 web sites that were the most rich in business information. The team then indexed each of these sites by type (law firm, business/trade publication, business school, for example); by geography and by industries covered. We also allowed the user to search for specific types of documents, just as Google does today. Three of the sample searches we frequently demonstrated were:
- “Asbestos litigation” information published by a UK law firm in a PDF.
- “Economic value added” information published on the site of a US educational institution
- “Hedge fund returns” published by a commercial or investment bank
Despite how helpful this type of searching was, our business model was viable for only 2 years. We actually had annualized revenue approaching $1 million at the peak. But the dot-com bust and the emergence of Google killed our business model so we wound up integrating Portal B into Alacra at no charge. Most customers switched to Google for all their searches but we still have a number of dedicated Alacra Web Search users and we have maintained our indexing over the years.
Now Portal B is back in the form of eight Google Custom Search Engines:
- Business & Trade Publications
- Law Firms
- Commercial & Investment Banks
- Consulting and Accounting Firms
- Educational Institutions
- Market Research Firms
- Trade Associations
- Venture Capital & Private Equity Firms
These are available at www.alacra.com/alacrasearch as well as within Alacra. By switching to Google Custom Search Engines we’ll be able to provide faster results plus all the benefits of Google’s technology on our well-researched site indices. This will be free to all users and will be supported by advertising, as you can see on the screen shots here.
Each index has a set of facets so that results can be filtered. For example, the Law Firm index can be filtered by geography and the Business & Trade Publication index can be filtered by industry. So you can look for results from European Law Firms or you can search for information on Wimax published by telecommunications trade publications.
(Shown below: search for "green electronics" across market research firms index)
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