The Search Engines Go Deep - From Outsell e-briefs July 2, 2004

The Search Engines Go Deep

We've commented from time to time on the fact that Web search engines are aggressively going after the kind of content that until now was primarily accessible through paid information services. In a recent Briefing, Outsell Vice President and Lead Analyst Chuck Richard summarized the various initiatives underway. Anyone who doubts that the search players want a piece of the scholarly and scientific publishing markets should be paying attention. The search engines state their missions as follows:

- Google: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful";

- Yahoo!: "to invest more heavily to get more content into our search engine experience."

Here are the kinds of acquisition targets they are after:

- Yahoo!'s Content Acquisition Program will target content embedded in the "invisible Web"

- Google is indexing IEEE Xplore abstracts

- CrossRef Search pilot: the full texts of scholarly journals are searchable using Google

- Google is indexing the scholarly papers of 17 universities, including MIT

- Google is indexing Extenza e-journals, a division of Royal Swets and Zeitlinger

- Google is indexing a subset of OCLC WorldCat records

- Amazon's A9 search engine, powered by Google, accesses Amazon's "Search Inside the Book" function

Traditional aggregators face challenges on many fronts, and this is just one of them. The Briefing, "Competitor Assessment: Aggregators And Search Engines - Sparring, Partnering, Or Ignoring Each Other?" tells the whole story.

Available for purchase at www.outsellinc.com.