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Last month’s announcement by Newssift (part of the Financial Times Group) of its meaning-based vertical search engine was an important new way to look at search for business professionals – you can quickly see how it’s different if you try it at www.newssift.com.

This morning, Newssift and FirstRain announced that FirstRain’s technology provides the business-relevant content: news, blogs, and other original, authoritative pieces of web content that Newssift consumes. We drive business content into the Newssift search application – here is the press release.

Why does this matter to Newssift? Well at the heart is the quest for quality of search results. If you’ve ever tried to use Google for business research you know how nearly impossible it is. You just get too many old and junky results back so you can’t sort the good from the bad – and so you can’t solve your research problem. In contrast, FirstRain has built its name providing highly relevant finance and market research information, extracted and analyzed from the web, to professional investors and corporate users. This matters because some of the smartest people in the world manage money. They run hedge funds, they manage billions of dollars of assets in mutual funds and pension funds – and they have a lower tolerance for junk or irrelevant data than any other group of users in the world. They have driven us to produce only the highest level of quality of research from the web.

As a result of our user’s demands, we’ve built considerable expertise in the quality of the content coming in which we are now making available to Newssift. The quality and classification of the sources, sorting out useful and authoritative blogs from junky promotional ones. Sorting out the highest quality journalism sources from countries all over the world. And now that content is flowing into Newssift so if you use Newssift you’re getting access to the first stage of the FirstRain advantage.

Newssift has led the way, and other media leaders now have a template. We read daily of publishers of every stripe struggling to build and retain their online audience. Whether it’s a technology trade journal, a leading voice of the blogosphere, an investing website, or a major metro newspaper, new tools are coming up to make the web useful for business research in the new generation of publishing that’s emerging. And Newssift won’t be the last.

Exciting times ahead.

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