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Zibb Jab: Business Search Engines Take
on Google and Enterprise Aggregators |
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30 October 2006 |
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There's a lot of talk about coming up with better business
search engines lately, but so far the results offered by
most publishers have been evolutionary rather than
revolutionary. Reed Business Information has upped the ante
substantially with its new Zibb search portal that covers a
wide swath of content from both business media sources as
well as from weblogs, Web sites and its own product and
company databases. This blend of business-tuned content
comes wrapped in a thoroughly up-to-date platform promises
to give both Web search engines and enterprise subscription
news databases a strong run for their money. |
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Business media companies are
beginning to squirm at the prospects of online revenues
trickling away from their core publications. While online
content in general is a major concern for them, search engines
are the real culprit tugging at their margins. As Graeme
McCracken, Chief Operating Officer for Reed Business Search (RB
Search) noted in a recent
white paper: “Google and Yahoo are here to stay, and 59% of
advertising dollars is migrating out of traditional media to
internet search. It’s not new money. A portion of that is our
existing revenue. If we don’t have an offer in that market, how
can we expect to exploit it?”
How, indeed.
Reed
Business Information is no stranger to business search
engines through its
KellySearch product and company directory and its recently
spun-off ReedLink business search portal (now expanded by
Advanstar
into
FindGuru). But product and company directories are one
thing: being able to provide a truly compelling alternative for
information searches that leverage a media company's core
editorial assets are another.
Enter Zibb,
a development initiative from RB Search that leverages search
technology from
FAST
Search & Transfer and a new attitude towards search that
begins to move B2B media away from myopic visions of what
search can be. Initially Zibb was to be a search engine
exclusively for editorial content from Reed Business
Information publications. But quickly the RB Search team
realized that a broader vision of what search could be for
business media required opening up the search engine to
editorial content from other publishers as well. The result is
a portal that provides content from leading B2B trade
publications as well as product and company content from
KellySearch and content from weblogs and Web sites.
Zibb provides very powerful search results from a
state-of-the-art search infrastructure blended into a highly
usable interface with good navigation controls - and contextual
sponsored link ads, of course. Although deepest thus far in
content covering the electronics industry, Zibb covers all
businesses in its search results. Drill-down filters allow a
user to refine search results quickly in specific industry
sectors that relate to the pages returned from a search query,
or to switch via a tabbed interface from blended results to
just news sources, products, suppliers or Web and blog content.
This is a multi-faceted research tool that zeroes in on a
broad array of sources combining the best of B2B search engines
to date with the savvy required to appeal to a generation of
searchers brought up on Google's simplicity and agnostic
approach to sources. It's still far from perfect - in a
search for "Shore Communications" on Zibb you get our
terms and
conditions of use page rather than our
home page near the top of
the search results, as opposed to spot-on
Google results - but as a starting point that offers
a broad array of business research tools against the best of
product databases and the best of the Web it's a darn good
place to start for professionals seeking highly usable content.
What can other publishers learn from this new experiment in
business search engines? Here are a few key insights to
consider:
- It pays to be agnostic in a smart way. Zibb's key
strength is its willingness to go beyond most business
publishers' views of content that's worth monetizing. By
combining open Web content, media content from a broad array
of publishers and their own databases of products and
companies Reed Business Information is acknowledging that it
takes a Google-like approach to expanding the inventory of
content that can be matched with advertisers to power online
ad revenues. If this means that their own editorial sources
don't win all the time in search results, then so be it -
it's getting the content that users want most at the time
that they need it most in a valuable context that's going to
provide the most reliable business media revenues moving
forward.
- It pays to use smart design. Zibb enjoys a very
intuitive and clean design to encourage users to leverage
both Google-like simplicity with the sophisticated of a
strong taxonomy to encourage users to engage it on many
levels. Filtering and drill-downs are easy to execute and the
aesthetics of the interface, while not leading-edge, are
definitely more up-to-date than most business search engines
and help to frame highly usable features. Factiva's Search
2.0 has lead the way this year in offering advanced design in
search tools for subscription databases (also via FAST
technology) but Zibb comes closer to blending the best of
enterprise search engines and open Web search engines with
more focus on the quality of the content being returned and
fewer extraneous bells and whistles.
- It still pays to be Google. As innovative as Zibb
is in many ways, its raw edges demonstrate that it will take
time, development and usage to get the best content to
surface at the top of its search results on a regular basis.
This leaves room open for users to continue with Google and
other favored search engines to be a default starting place
for business searches - and for these sites to improve their
own offerings. It also is difficult at times for publishers
to accept that the Google success story encompasses a broad
array of elements that go beyond pure search results to
enhance its use. From browser plug-ins to embeddable search
tools to integrated ecommerce tools there are a lot of ways
that Google extends its brand into people's lifestyles - all
of which must be considered carefully as publishers consider
how to emulate the best of their efforts.
While Zibb is still in its infancy it's pointing the way
towards a new generation of business search tools that can
place business media in a powerful light while not getting
caught up in outdated thinking about how to defend editorial
value. If the content is good and relevant it's going to
surface in the most valuable contexts and succeed - with or
without subscription database aggregators to lend it a hand.
The New Aggregation is coming to business media at last -
and not a moment too soon.
-
John Blossom
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