Improving Search

By Lauren Horwitz. Posted 5/2007 on searchcio.techtarget.com

With the dominance of search engines like Google and Yahoo -- which together are the entry point for roughly 70% of all searches conducted on the Web -- media organizations have enlisted various strategies to increase exposure to their content. As some companies tinker with search optimization techniques or buy keywords to improve content visibility, others are going straight to the source.

Since March 2006, Reed Business a global business-to-business publisher with $2.3 billion in revenue, has been developing a search project to rival Google. With more than 80% of Reed Business' traffic coming from search engines, says Graeme McCracken, COO of Reed Business Search, the Zibb project grew out of the concern "that Google and Yahoo could search our sites better than we could."

So Reed Business enlisted categorization software from Teragram Corp. and FAST Search and Transfer's enterprise search technology to create a vertical search engine. It has deployed Zibb search on 22 Reed Business sites and at Zibb.com and will go live on an additional 170 by mid-2007.

Zibb uses a semantic understanding of the pages it searches (where the search understands the context of a Web page and its relationship to other pages rather than simply looking for instances of a given term). McCracken says that the search tool returns more targeted results -- with, say, true research-oriented results separated from vendor results.

Search traffic on Reed Business sites like Variety magazine has increased tenfold. And following Google's model, Zibb aggregates the most relevant information from around the Web, not just from Reed Business sites. "We want to provide the user with the best answer without bias toward our content," he says. "At the end of the day, search has to be about the user."