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Thomson and Kluwer Leave the GYM to Increase Vertical Search Fitness

Important Details: Both Thomson’s WebPlus and Kluwer’s OvidSP are vertical search engines designed to complement the companies’ existing products. At first glance, several similarities are apparent:

• they both extend existing products in an effort to offer users a “better” search experience;
• they both build on infrastructure that has been in development over the last 2-3 years, and will be rolled out and re-used across business units;
• they are both designed to add value and maintain competitive edge for existing products, rather than being self-contained products in their own right;
• they both leverage existing expertise and resources to produce their search rankings.

But look a little closer and their differences, whilst subtle, highlight the two companies’ different strategies.

• Thomson’s WebPlus is still in beta, and focuses on extending the reach of Thomson’s products by indexing the open web to offer “better” (read “more inclusive”) search results. It is billed as an “Open Web companion to ISI Web of Knowledge” (WoK). Thomson’s technology indexes any openly available content, which could include premium content that has been exposed to search indexing robots, or that has freely available abstracts or similar. Thomson has partnered with Microsoft, taking MSN’s raw results and then leveraging WoK’s infrastructure and editorial indexing capabilities to optimise the results and avoid polluting them with “noise” from irrelevant content. Web Plus will be a free companion product to Thomson’s paid-for services.

• OvidSP is on its first release, and has yet to be rolled out across Kluwer’s vertical business units. It offers an easy to use user interface and sophisticated ranking algorithms to offer “better” (read “more precise”) search results across Ovid’s content. Whilst librarians will take the time to learn search skills, the average researcher will not, and will expect search to be as easy as using Google. OvidSP aims to offer the best of both worlds, delivering ease of use without losing any fidelity of results. The tool therefore has “simple” and “advanced” modes, so users hooked on Google’s simplicity of search will get their fix, but power users have access to the precision of a complex search tool. Its initial focus is as a generic science search tool, with plans to extend it into other verticals in due course. It will be sold as part of Kluwer’s paid-for services.

No concrete plans have yet been announced for the immediate future of the products. WebPlus is in beta, and will be rolled out across Thomson’s legal vertical in due course. OvidSP looks to stay focused on STM, and will be rolled out across other STM verticals. Even in its generic form, OvidSP hints at powerful optimisation possibilities: at London Online, Kluwer demonstrated precision retrieval from medical textbooks from a complex multi-term medical query.

Implications: Search has a problem: although over 90% of users start with GYM (Google, Yahoo! or MSN), approximately 30% of their search results are seen as unsatisfactory. Worse, users entertain high expectations of search precision but remain reluctant to change their search habits and move away from using GYM to initiate their searches.

The other big player here is Elsevier, with its Scirus vertical scientific search tool already well established as a free-to-use tool complementing Science Direct. It is worthy of note that all three players appear to accept that GYM-initiated searches are here to stay. Rather than trying to change users’ habits, vertical search technologies aim to capitalise on their dissatisfaction and maximise the amount of time users stay in their tools after an click-through from their initial search.

With vertical search an immature market, the offerings are experimental and varied. Kluwer is seeking to manage users’ expectations once they have subscribed to its service. Elsevier and Thomson appear to be offering an open vertical search and trying to hook users earlier in their search process. We must also not write off disruptive services (see Insights, 18 December 2007, Collexis and SiloBreaker: the emergence of Vertical Search 2.0?). As vertical search becomes increasingly competitive, we expect to see more activity in the coming months, and an increasing number of partnerships between content providers and technology vendors, as publishers move to innovate to compete for traffic.

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