Competitive Intelligence Marketplace

AuditoriumA

From Profy: "AuditoriumA.com is a human guided search service that guides people through their queries via a striking visual platform. The service uses intuitive site visualizations to guide users to quality cultural events, performances, speeches, articles, documentaries and other subjects. Founder Tony Mars sent us a private preview of version 2.0, and we thought you would be interested in this striking service. Tony has also provided Profy readers with a special invitation to try out auditoriumA via this exclusive link."

Publicis Adding Search CI Capability

Ad giant Publicis Groupe has signed on AdGooroo to provide search intelligence functionality:

"On the agency advertising side, it really shows and solidifies the point that competitive intelligence in search is a must have for advance searched marketers," he said. "For those that may not be doing it yet, they will see that if a company like Publicis is willing to do a deal for all its agencies, then the marketplace is starting to understand that this data is very important for marketers."

searchCrystal

I just signed up for the meta-search engine searchCrystal and am going to give it a trial run for a week or two.  I like how they present the results in a "target" format with the more relevant appearing closer to the bulls eye. To the left is an image of the result for the search on "competitive intelligence."  (click on it to enlarge the image).

Hopefully I'll remember to do an updated post to relate might experience with it.

Another Reason You REALLY Need to Track Yourself on Google

I'm going to assume that since most people who read this blog are CI folks that you, the reader, long ago started tracking your company on Google via tools like Google Alerts.  Well, if you haven't then this news might prompt you to.

Google News now allows comments to be emailed to them about stories they have aggregated and if after reviewing the comment they decide that it has come from a source in the story, a representative of that source or a third party expert relevant to the story, then they'll attach the comment to the story.  Read about it on Steve Rubel's blog and make sure you also read the comments for thoughts and more info.  Also here's the Google News help page dedicated to comments.

Google Alerts Explodes

For the last couple of years I've had a "competitive intelligence" alert set up on Google.  Every day I'd get an email with anywhere from one to five items, but since Google added blog tracking the number of items has exploded to around 15-20 per day.  Most interesting to me is that there are a lot of job listings in the blog section.  The only reason I can figure that the job listings are being included is that they're distributed as RSS feeds and are thus considered "blog" items.  I'll look into it and update later.

FYI, the news feed to the left is an RSS stream of the "competitive intelligence" Google alert.

FirstStop WebSearch

FirstStop Websearch just announced version 4.2.  Here's what's new (from their website):

• Auto-Discovery - The Discovery Tree is on by default.
• New "Social Bookmarks" search category - Search millions of pages bookmarked by users of Furl.net, Spurl.net and CiteULike.org.
• Integration with Web Finalist™ - With a single click you export search results to our new tool Web Finalist™ to scan them for specific information.
• New "Minimize to tray" setting - Choose whether you want to minimize the program window to tray or not.
• Easy access to search categories from the main menu.
• Improved "Merge Results" feature (Deluxe Edition and Visual Edition).
• New results are highlighted when you repeat searches (Deluxe Edition and Visual Edition).

Yahoo! Dipping Toes Into Premium Service Water

Yahoo! has launched a beta for searching subscription content.  Right now the subscriptions are limited to seven products, including FT.com, Wall Street Journal, Consumer Reports, Forrester Research, IEEE Publications, TheStreet.com and New England Journal of Medicine.