FYI: new and notable.
Bonnie Hohhof, bhohhof@scip.org
Search engines: news and updates.Google has launched an experimental program that indexes excerpts of popular books, blending the content from these works into regular Google search results.
Google Print differs from Amazon's recently introduced
Search Inside the Book program, which makes the full text of books available online to readers. By contrast, Google is indexing only a small excerpt from each book, typically taken from the inside cover, jacket reviews, author biographies or the book's introduction. Chris Sherman. “Google introduces book searches.” SearchEngineWatch, Dec 17.
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3290351Google has often on a monthly basis tuned its search algorithm, so as to deliver the most relevant listings to keyword searchers. To the expert Google watchers this is known as the
Google Dance. Since this sometimes created an apparently chaotic reordering of the ranking results, the Google watchers gave these updates names, much as hurricanes are named. So in early summer 2003, we had the
Dominic Update, followed in early Fall by the
Esmeralda Update. The
Florida Update started in mid-November. The amount of turmoil in the Google search results has been matched by the volumes that have been written on what it all means, why it may have been done, and what you can do about it. This Newsletter provides an
executive summary of what has occurred. It includes a number of links if you wish to understand any aspect of the upheaval in greater detail. Barry Welford. ‘Who’s naughty, who’s nice, Google Christmas 2003.’ Strategic Marketing Montreal, #35. Dec. 15.
http://www.strategicmarketingmontreal.ca/newsletter-35.htmGoogle doesn't want you to search inside the book at Amazon. They want you to search inside the book at Google! That's what they're working on, anyway -- get some more skinny about it at
http://print.google.com/print/faq.html. From the FAQ: " It turns out that not all the world's information is already on the Internet, so Google has been experimenting with a number of publishers to test their content online. During this trial, publishers' content is hosted by Google and is ranked in our search results according to the same technology we use to evaluate websites." Results are delivered along with relevant Google AdWords ads and some links to buy some books. Tara Calishain. ‘What (and why) in the world is Google Print?’ Research Buzz, Dec. 18.
http://www.researchbuzz.org/archives/001318.shtmlWhat if
Google is combining the artificial intelligence of
Applied Semantics Concept Server and this monitoring of click throughs. In this case, Google's algorithm isn't applied universally to every set of search results. Rather, the various factors that make up the algorithm can be adjusted on the fly, delivering results that improve with each search. The more popular the search term, the more searches are conducted and the faster the results will improve. As Google monitors more searches, the Concept Server will start to notice patterns between similar concepts and the type of results chosen by the searcher. With every search, Google will be better able to anticipate what the searcher is looking for, even if their query isn't right on target. Gord Hotchkiss. ‘Google’s Florida update: one month later.’ SearchEngineGuide., Dec. 15.
http://www.searchengineguide.com/hotchkiss/2003/1215_gh1.htmlGoogle has beefed up its Froogle shopping search engine, introduced two new "quick links" for searchers, and has added new features to its AdWords program. Chris Sherman. ‘Google enhances Froogle, offers new ad search features.’ SearchEngineWatach.com. Dec. 15.
www.searchenginewatch.comGrokker is back as a smarter and less expensive ($49 instead of $99) application that works on top of many different databases, including the all-important Google. Grokker by Groxis is not a web service but an application that sits on your PC. Grokker takes the raw output of a search and organizes it into categories and subcategories. Groxis has put more intelligence into the software this time, so it is not dependent, as it was with Northern Lights, on categories established by others. This means that a wide variety of types of databases can be Grokked-now Grokker can search with six different engines simultaneously—Yahoo, MSN, Alta Vista, Fast, Teoma, and WiseNet. It also can organize searches for products on Amazon or for files on your own desktop. David Kirkpatrick. ‘Going deeper than Google.’ Fortune, Dec. 16.
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/fastforward/0,15704,563090,00.htmlSMEALSearch is a niche search engine that searches the web and catalogs academic articles as well as commercially produced articles and reports that address any branch of Business. The search engine crawls websites of universities, commercial organizations, research institutes and government departments to retrieve academic articles, working papers, white papers, consulting reports, magazine articles, and published statistics and facts. Pennsylvania State University.
http://smealsearch.psu.edu/Surfwax has launched a free version of their LawKT service. The free service allows a user to search an index of over 60,000 law firm publications from over 280 law firms. There's also a legal news section that aggregates news on over 1,000 law-related topics. The site is accessible at
http://law.surfwax.com . Tara Calishain. ResearchBuzz, Dec. 18.
http://www.researchbuzz.com/Think about what's at stake culturally and socially in the search wars, and all those zeros start looking pretty paltry by comparison. The Internet is swiftly becoming the primary repository of the bulk of human information. Search is the way we get at that information, and companies like Google wield enormous power. A gang of
web-search companies is gunning for Google. Lev Grossman. “Search and destroy.’ Time online edition, Dec. 15.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101031222-561499,00.htmlInternet sites with information you can use.Aardvarknet provides
Asian Resources for librarians. Resources include descriptions of over 400 Asian databases, and listings of Asian digital libraries, national libraries, university libraries, and professional organizations.
http://www.aardvarknet.info/user/aardvarkwelcome/Looking for the lyrics for classic
Christmas carols? Simply click on the title that you're interested in below, and you'll be taken to a page that shows all of the words to the carol in question.
http://www.christmas-carols.net/The
Dictionary of Marketing Terms offers the official definition of more than 4,000 commonly used marketing terms and phrases. It is maintained by the American Marketing Association.
http://www.marketingpower.com/live/mg-dictionary.phpDow Jones has a series of blue chip, benchmark and specialty
indexes, plus Sector Scan. Sector Scan gives you the lowdown each week on fundamental trends in the U.S. Total Market Index and its 10 economic sectors. Sales growth, profit growth, costs, profit margins -- all this and more is covered in a succinct report, updated every weekend.
http://djindexes.com/jsp/index.jspEPI’s JobWatch web feature tracks current trends in the U.S. labor market and offers up-to-date readings on its status.
National Jobs and Wages is a special section devoted to presenting and explaining the essential trends in the current labor market
http://www.jobwatch.org/Looking for the
definition of a term in a particular subject can be difficult and time consuming. That's where the
Glossarist can help you look. Just choose a subject or search for the industry you are interested in at the top.
http://www.glossarist.com/With more than 300,000 users worldwide,
NewsNow is the UK's leading online press monitoring company. NewsNow monitors breaking news in 15+ languages from thousands of the Internet's most important online publications, including international, national and regional titles, newswires, magazines, press releases and exclusively online news sources. It searches over 15,000 news sources every 5 minutes.
http://www.newsnow.co.uk/The World Values Survey is a worldwide investigation of sociocultural and political change. It is conducted by a network of social scientist at leading universities all around world. The survey is performed on nationally representative samples in almost 80 societies on all six inhabited continents. A total of four waves have been carried since 1981 allowing accurate comparative analysis.
http://www.worldvaluessurvey.com/Software and products.BioSeeker Group is now launching BioSeeker France. France is one of Europe's foremost biotechnology countries with a long history of succesful research coupled with a new growing spirit of entrepreneurship. Responsible for these activities will be Dr. Tomas Forslund, educated both at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden and Université Claude Bernard in Lyon, France. Dr. Forslund has also got several years of analytical experience for BioSeeker Group. He will now lead the work of reinforcing the contacts with our French customers, as well as extending BioSeeker's network in France. He will also specifically study the French biotech industry, in order for BioSeeker to better meet the demands and questions from the French, and other, companies. Press release, Dec. 13.
www.bioseeker.comAnexsys, a leading provider of payments solutions to government, selected
Cerado in order to know more about their competitors in the electronic payments industry. Now, less than two weeks after signing onto the
Cerado Competitive Intelligence Service, Anexsys is already seeing results. Cerado delivers to Anexsys timely, relevant information on their competitors, including competitive pricing, products, management bios, key customers, alliances, strengths and weaknesses, and other targeted information. Both the Anexsys direct sales force and the sales teams of their channel partners use information from the Cerado service to tailor their offerings to their prospects. Having this information enables the sales teams to identify the current weaknesses of their competition, and allows them to present Anexsys solutions in the most compelling manner possible, while taking into account current competitive conditions. Press release, Oct. 13.
http://www.cerado.comDialog announced a series of upgrades to Dialog
NewsEdge, its industry-specific, personalized current awareness and news alerting service for corporations, that will facilitate information sharing within subscribing organizations. The upgrades include improved methods for printing, saving and sharing multiple delivered and retrieved documents, a boost to using the information delivered through Dialog NewsEdge collaboratively within companies and departments. An additional enhancement is the highlighting of search terms within retrieved documents, enabling users to more quickly judge the relevance of articles and reports. Press release Dec 22.
http://www.dialog.com/pressroom/2003/newsedge_122203.shtmlGlobal Securities Information Inc., the leader in SEC legal research and provider of the online service
LIVEDGAR, announced today the availability of Power Search. Power Search is a new way to search extensive databases that involves running multiple full-text searches and combining them in ways that can broaden or narrow the search results. Press release, Dec. 18.
www.gsionline.comIntelliseek, a Cincinnati-based technology company, is sponsoring an online seminar and has published a white paper on creating ready-for-action business intelligence from vast amounts of unstructured data about consumers, customers, products and competitors. The paper and seminar tackle one of the day's biggest challenges for business, government agencies, marketers and researchers: how to analyze and gain insights from the vast amounts of information available in today's data-rich environment. Press Release Nov 13.
www.intelliseek.comInterface Software is the leading provider of CRM software and services, enabling professional services firms and other relationship-based organizations to create the
Relationship Intelligence they need to uncover new business opportunities and enhance client service. Relationship Intelligence is a firm-wide asset that reveals the unique and complex connections between people, companies, relationships, experience and expertise, empowering professionals to uncover, extend and leverage their relationship networks, transforming who and what they know to find new revenue opportunities, differentiate themselves from the competition and enhance client service. Press Release.
www.interfacesoftware.comLexisNexis Group, a provider of legal, news, and business information, has announced the launch of a single global technology platform that is designed to deliver its information products and services in the United States and worldwide. LexisNexis plans to launch enhanced online legal research products in Australia and France in the first quarter of 2004. LexisNexis will also begin releasing enhanced news and business research and business intelligence products on the new platform to companies and information specialists in Germany in early 2004. Press release, Dec. 18.
www.lexisnexis.comNewspaperDirect, a technology company specializing in the digital delivery of same-day editions of newspapers, will be launching a digital newspaper service for libraries. This service is intended to enable libraries to provide their patrons with same-day editions of out-of-state and international newspapers. The company's technology provides the flexibility to print on laser printers or view replicas online in a Web browser. NewspaperDirect's catalog of titles includes more than 185 newspapers delivered to corporate offices, hotels, cruise ships, retail outlets, home subscribers, and Web browsers. Press release, Dec 18.
http://www.newspaperdirect.comBecause a
taxonomy reflects the most important knowledge categories of an organisation, organisations that carry out the same business activities need similar taxonomies. This fact and the rising importance of taxonomies to organisations has led
Verity to make six tailorable taxonomies available to jump-start the development of an organisation's taxonomy. ‘Verity provides standard ways to categorize content.’ IT-Director.com, Dec 12.
http://www.it-director.com/article.php?articleid=11515Vivisimo, a software company based in Pittsburgh, Pa., offers technology that clusters search results on the fly into folders labeled by category. While the typical list of search results appears on the right, the clickable folders on the left, helping the searcher make sense of the various links and drill down into more relevant results. People who love lists and are used to organizing information hierarchically may appreciate the way Vivisimo displays the folder contents. Those people may feel overwhelmed by
Grokker 2.0, the zoomable graphical search interface created by Groxis. But people who think in terms of spatial relationships may find Grokker makes search work better. Susan Kuchinskas. ‘Monetizing graphical search.’ InternetAdvertising.report. Dec. 15.
http://www.internetnews.com/IAR/article.php/3289001Demand has been extremely high for behavioral-based surveys," said Jason Levin, Internet analyst at NetRatings, which provides Internet research services in partnership with Nielsen Media Research, New York. "Clients want customized, behavior-based data." Even more important, he added, "This is a perfect tool for
competitive analysis." Using
WebIntercept, companies can intercept users on their competitors’ Web sites and find out what motivates their decisions to buy products and gather information. Kate Maddox. ‘Nielsen/ NetRatings launches WebIntercept.’ BtoB, Dec. 8.
http://www.btobonline.com/cgi-bin/article.pl?id=11994Editors at Pharmaceutical Executive magazine used a unique
competitive intelligence tool from the
Wolters Kluwer Health Pharma Solutions division, a leading provider of information services and decision-support tools to the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries, to develop predictions about which drugs currently in development are most likely to succeed. Press release, Dec 17,
http://www.wkhealth.com.
Searching reviews and tips.
Researching companies online. This business research tutorial presents a step-by-step process for finding free company and industry information on the World Wide Web. Debbie Flannigan.
http://home.sprintmail.com/~debflanagan/index.html \Tips on finding local coverage of a product tampering case, including a description of resources: I started out with the usual suspects, including a search of the large news sources. My next approach was to go directly to the newspapers in the town where the incident occurred. continuing my research on local coverage of that product tampering case, I looked up the radio stations in the state I was interested in, and clicked through to each of the news, business, talk and public radio stations in the area. Mary Ellen Bates. ‘Tip of the month.’ Bates information services. December.
http://www.batesinfo.com/tip.htmlGeneral readings of interest.
Brian Hemsworth, president of Newman Grace Inc., an advertising and marketing agency in Woodland Hills, said some people think
stealth advertising has a negative connotation, but it really is another strategic, tactical approach for reaching consumers. He described it as low-profile advertising. Hemsworth believes it can be done ethically and responsibly. Newman Grace supports the code of
ethics provided by the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, a systematic and ethical program. Ginger Rosenkrans. ‘ Are stealth ads ethical?’ Ventura County Star. Dec. 8 .
http://www1.venturacountystar.com/vcs/business/article/0,1375,VCS_128_2484248,00.htmlLeveraging advances in communication and integration, a new kind of application --
corporate social networking -- is being folded into the CRM feature set. Corporate social networking software measures, reads, and evaluates e-mails, instant messages, and calendar entries, capturing the names of message authors while protecting the content. The names are then exposed to algorithms that search, weight, and rank others in the database for possible contacts within the company a user is trying to reach. Ephraim Schwartz. ‘Social networking targets the enterprise.’ InfoWorld, Dec. 15.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/12/15/49NNsocial_1.html Competition among multinationals these days is likely to be a three-dimensional game of global chess: the moves an organization makes in one market are designed to achieve goals in another market in ways that aren’t immediately apparent to rivals. We call this approach “competing under strategic interdependence,” or CSI. And where this
strategic interdependence exists, the complexity of the competitive situation can quickly overwhelm ordinary analysis. With the following mapping tools and techniques, you can learn to see the whole chessboard—that is, you can anticipate how the moves you make in one market can influence
competitive interactions not only in that market but in others far afield. Ian MacMillan et. al. ‘Global competition: what’s the first move?’ HBR Working Knowledge, June 23.
http://www.workingknowledge.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=3545&t=globalization&noseek=oneNegotiation is a delicate business, made even more delicate by different
cultural understandings. How can you avoid the subtle pitfalls and make deals go smoothly? This article from
Harvard Management Communication Letter has suggestions. Andrew Rosenbaum. ‘ Tips for avoiding misunderstandings when negotiating cross-border deals.’ HBR Working Knowledge, March 31.
http://www.workingknowledge.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=3401&t=globalization&noseek=oneGetting online is the easy part, finding a useful Web page is a bit harder - and keeping track of a useful Web page is another issue altogether. People have devised many tricks - such as sending e-mails to themselves or jotting on sticky notes - for
keeping track of Web pages, but William Jones and Harry Bruce at the University of Washington's Information School and Susan Dumais of Microsoft Research have found that often people don't use any of them when it comes time to revisit a Web page. Instead, they rely on their ability to find the Web page all over again. The researchers are studying how people "keep found things found" when looking for information on the Web. In a follow-on project, the researchers are developing a conceptual framework for how people decide to keep information available for use later on. ‘Keeping found things found: web tools don’t always mesh with how people work.’ Ascribe Newswire, Dec. 17.
http://www.ascribe.org/cgi-bin/spew4th.pl?ascribeid=20031217.055425&time=07%2028%20PST&year=2003&public=1The
holiday season, with all its traditions, family gatherings and general rejoicing, is now upon us. To commemorate this time of cheer, the U.S. Census Bureau presents a host of holiday-related facts and figures from its data warehouse. Facts for Features, US Census Public Information Office, Dec. 11.
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features/001582.htmlEach year since 1984, PNC Advisors has provided a tongue-in-cheek economic analysis, based on the cost of the goods and services purchased by the True Love in the holiday classic, “The
Twelve Days of Christmas.” Indeed, the cost of the five gold rings dropped by 5.6 percent, and the pear tree is down a full 28.6 percent from last year. However, these discounts were offset by the dancers, pipers and drummers who have seen significant increases in the cost of their services over 2002. PNC Bank. ‘The 12 days of Christmas.’
http://www.pncbank.com/12days/Articles mentioning competitive intelligence.
Find out how
Competitive Intelligence can help you compete in the e-business environment where everything — except customer demands — is shrinking! This module provides you with an "action plan" to help you become a stronger competitor in your chosen industry or market, using the power of technology. ‘Competitive Intelligence.’ Strategis. Updated Dec 12.
http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/epic/internet/inee-ef.nsf/vwGeneratedInterE/h_ee00499e.htmlCopyright Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals
www.scip.org scip.online, number 45, December 23, 2003
