(Continued)

The technology is designed as a major search improvement for users trying to grapple with an increasing amount of digital information, offering a single hunting system instead of several different search engines.

Microsoft's Windows operating system, which is on 90 percent of personal computers, provides tools for file management on PCs. But Mehdi conceded it doesn't have a quick system for searching.

In other news, although the Internet has given the person on the street access to more information than ever before, business users need even more. So argues Clare Hart, CEO of search firm Factiva, which was formed in 1999 from Dow Jones Interactive and Reuters Business Briefing.

Factiva brings together information from more than 9,000 sources including newspapers, newswires, transcripts of news programmes from the BBC and other broadcasters, plus historical stock market data. It is a program for desktop machines that lets customers search for information among this pool of sources.

Factiva, like Google and many other search engines, can be queried via a toolbar and the service has been reworked to reflect users' growing familiarity with the net and the tools it is creating. Now, for instance, news feeds that come out of Factiva are in web formats, allowing them to be put into documents and pages to provide up to date information.

In its pre-Factiva incarnation, it was used by librarians and other information professionals whose job it was to find and supply facts to other people. The growth of the web as a vast corpus of data threw that role into question. "In 2000 and 2001 so many times we had customers saying to us that most of this is available for free on the web," said Ms Hart.

<<< Previous page              Next: Search engines embroiled in a fight >>>

Pages: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12

Bookmark the Rank for $ales website by simply clicking here.

Legal Notice
If you find this newsletter interesting and of value to you, you are encouraged to link to it, using a normal H REF text link. The Rank for $ales Weekly newsletter is Copyright © Serge Thibodeau, 2004. Any reproduction, full or partial is prohibited without my prior written consent. Address all enquiries for the proper and acceptable procedures regarding certain limited reprint permissions to sthibodeau@rankforsales.com

You can link to the Rank for Sales web site as much as you like. Read our section on how your company can participate in our reciprocal link exchange program and increase your rankings in the major search engines.