Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave…
by Deborah Lynne Wiley
Next Wave Consulting, Inc.
published in , NFAIS Newsletter 40, No. 10 (October 1998) pp. 157-158.
Remember the early days of search engines? You got a simple box to type in some words and back came a list of a few thousand hits. Success was measured on the number of hits and the size of the database. And, back then there was a clear divide between hierarchically arranged subject directories and search engines.
Well, things have evolved and merged. Subject directories link seamlessly to search engines. Search engines provide "channels" (a fancy name for subjects - a card catalog today would have channel headings) to favorite subject areas. And the goal is to be your portal to the internet (the term gateway seems to be too old fashioned).
A web portal is defined by the online Webopaedia as:
"a web site or service that offers a broad array of resources and services, such as e-mail, forums, search engines, and online shopping malls. The first Web portals were online services, such as AOL, that provided access to the Web, but by now most of the traditional search engines have transformed themselves into Web portals to attract and keep a larger audience."
So this is the new world of search engines. The goal is no longer to help you find what you are looking for. The goal is to attract and keep audiences. Thus the investment by major media companies like Disney in search engine companies (Disney acquired a 43% share of InfoSeek). Of course, if they also help you find an answer, that’s even better. And most of the major portals provide free news, stock quotes, weather, and an amazing array of personalization features. The more eyes on a site, the higher the advertising fees.
The technology has not advanced much in the past few years. There are a few new players, like Ask Jeeves and What-U-Seek, who do attempt to provide additional features such as true natural language searching and keywords in context, but these engines are little known and used. And Northern Light is carving a niche by focusing on business information and providing access to proprietary content from IAC and others, as well as adding some concept features beyond basic relevancy . But the major thrust has been in branding and marketing.
YAHOO! has been declared by many as the most successful search engine - and it’s not even a search engines. YAHOO! started early providing human categorization to the web, and then branched out into providing a variety of content and services to make itself into a portal. And, it linked to search engines and licensed content, but always keeping the YAHOO! brand out in front. A self-described "content aggregator", YAHOO!’s stock market valuation of $6.9 billion is higher than nearly all media companies. A force to be reckoned with indeed. A comparison of revenue of search engines for the first quarter in 1998 showed YAHOO! with a net profit of $4million, while the second most popular search engine, Excite, posted a nearly $7 million loss.
The search engine features have become a commodity, just window dressing to get users to the site. Several sites are taking the partnering approach, licensing the search engine from one of the major services. Hence Inktomi is the search engine behind Wired’s HotBot, Microsoft’s new Start, CNet’s Snap, and others. The LookSmart Directory service is behind AltaVista’s and HotBot’s channels. Excite bought Mckinley’s directory service, Magellan, as well as the old AOL search engine, Webcrawler. In fact the Web site Quote.com makes more money from licensing it’s content to portals than from it’s own subscribers. The technology and even the content is not nearly as important as the branding and marketing.
So what does this all mean for database producers? This movement is seen in our world too. Engineering Village from EI is a specialized portal that provides a variety of services to engineers beyond its Compendex database. BioMedNet, the online club for biologists, is selling books and providing any service it can get its hands on to attract a large population of users. The secret is to be the brand and do the marketing - are you the portal in your niche world? Or, find the potential portals and license your content to them. Or, do both, but be careful not to compete with yourself.
Users are expecting a lot more than bibliographic citations and even full-text these days. When a small upstart company can give them all the news and information they need, why can’t you - an established information provider - do better? As always, content is still important. But how you deliver and expand the content is even more important. Partner with other content providers and technology companies to give users everything they want (well, almost…). But move quickly, before some upstart steals your market.
Copyright 1998, Next Wave Consulting, Inc.
