We’ve formally announced the research engine to the press today – you can see the press release here.
I’ve been briefing editors for a few days now, and expect I will be through this week to. It’s the first time we’ve talked with the press about our new capability and the category “intelligent business search” – although our customers have been using it for several months now. We decided to wait to announce it until we were very confident of customer adoption and that the value we had planned to build was actually being experienced by our customers. And we’re there today!
Customers are telling us how much they like it:
- the helpfulness of the information and the time it saves sales in finding new opportunities and preparing for meetings
- the time it saves marketing in staying on top of everything happening in their market
- the ease of configuring for all our users – just what they want to see in the form they want to see it
- the freshness of the management change data, especially in comparison to traditional tools
- the freshness and breadth of intelligence because the web is the source, especially in comparison to the market intelligence services most users have access to today.
Bottom line – you can find higher quality intelligence in minutes instead of hours, and exactly what you need for your job. If you want to try it you can request a free trial here.
Google just entered the world of faceted search, following in Bing’s footsteps, and it’s a good move. John Battelle, wrote a strong piece on what they are doing “Google Steps Gingerly Toward Search As Application” and on why this is a necessary move for Google — to deliver search as an application rather than as purely simple keyword search. I couldn’t agree with him more.
It’s good that Google is taking this step for the consumer, and it’s a step professional search based applications have already taken – they just have to be a great deal higher productivity than consumer applications, because in the office time is money.
If you are a FirstRain user you know the benefits of this approach are to get you instantly to the businesses, ecosystem and analytics around your question to help you make a decision quickly. The wind power example Google used in it’s announcement is a good one to look at.
In the Google case here are the results you get:
The results include news and information from traditional media sources, nongovernmental organizations and online sources such as Wikipedia. The left-hand navigation offers the ability to refine results by time and by news, blogs, images, books and more. Related search terms such as solar power, hydropower and geothermal energy are also listed. It’s definitely a big improvement over early technologies.
But for a sales or marketing person what you need is fresh, business relevant results and navigation for the businesses in the industry and the ecosystem of companies engaged in the wind energy industry — wind power generation and distribution. Recent events, industry trends, people-related changes and management turnover are all detectable and attached to the search results. For example, users can identify planned commercial wind-turbine installations; track key components, parts and raw materials used in their construction; and identify suppliers poised to benefit from investments in wind power. Up-to-the minute reports can be delivered regularly via email or mobile phone so that users stay on top of new developments.
Here’s the contrasting screen shot – and in FirstRain you can navigate through management teams, competitors, hot topics and all the other elements of the ecosystem from here – which is what intelligent business search can give you.
