The Falsely True Business Search Engine

OK, time to rip apart another flawed business model. Find/SVP, a biz info company having trouble finding its way through the chaging information landscape, has launched a business search engine called Find.com, whatever that means. It has teamed up with Empire Media and TripleHop Technologies for this. Empire and FIND/SVP each own 47.5 percent of the business, with TripleHop taking the balance.

Clickz has the launch story here…The site delivers search results from three different types of sources. Results from business sites that charge for their content, such as Gallup and Frost & Sullivan, appear at the top of the search results pages. Users can then buy the content. Results from a list of 3,000 business sites appear in the free organic listings, along with results from a variety of search engines.

The idea is to combine open-web based results along with premium content results. Combining these works well in theory, but in practice, it is a minefield to implement. And if their idea of specialization is “Let’s launch business search engine”, they only need to look back a few years and ask the likes of Business.com, AllBusiness.com, Alacra’s defunct PortalB and others littered all over the landscape. A business search engine is not a niche…

As Outsell mentioned in its weekly e-mail newsletter this week, the challenges for the new site are:

– The difficulty of creating any noise in a search space dominated by Google, Yahoo!, and other threats like MSN;

– Overcoming the fact that “business users” by nature have different niche- and function-oriented requirements, and that meeting everyone’s content needs is a challenge, if not impossible; and

– Placing this offering within an overall strategy for FIND/SVP, a company that seems to be moving all over the business information map.

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