Today, the proper noun "Google" is widely used as a verb, synonymous with the act of searching itself. References abound online, in print, and even on television encouraging people "to google" a subject for more information. In fact, a recent Google search for the phrase "Just Google It" returned approximately 1,060 hits.
To some extent, Chicago-based HighBeam Research LLC aspires to a similar fate. Founded in 2002 by former Hoover's co-founder/chairman/CEO Patrick Spain, HighBeam (known as Alacritude until very recently) seeks to to fill the gap between free search and costly professional research services and databases. HighBeam strives to pick up where Google leaves off—to help expand and refine the very definition of search.
Just HighBeam It
As Spain describes it, HighBeam provides more than a conduit to free content: "HighBeam was created to take advantage of an emerging opportunity in the online information industry. We perceived a need to create a serious, general-purpose online research service for individuals that would be positioned between free search engines such as Google and expensive, high-end enterprise services such as LexisNexis and Factiva," he explains.
"When I was at Hoover's, I observed that the Internet had accelerated a decades-long trend of individuals taking more control of the things that were important to them, including their health, careers, and education. Despite this fundamental change in society, most online information businesses were still focused on selling to a decreasing number of enterprise gatekeepers.
"Today," Spain continues, "there are two ways to sell to businesses: directly to the enterprise and directly, via the Internet, to the individuals within the enterprise. This, in turn, affects prices, business models, and the very structure of the affected industries. For example, with so many generic reference materials available online for free, consumers won't pay, or won't pay much, for content alone."
HighBeam's vision, therefore, is this: to provide individual researchers with enterprise-quality resources and tools that will help them do online research more efficiently and affordably. "The Internet," the company argues on its Web site, "has made ‘researchers' out of tens of millions of wired households across the world." But most search engines access only the free Internet, rather than subscription sites containing proprietary information—"thus depriving researchers of some of the most trustworthy and useful results."
To put it another way, consider this: "There are three main components of research—finding, organizing, and delivering information," Spain says. "Of these, it has proved most challenging to create better tools to organize information. Anyone who uses Google to do research should use our services as well. Google is a card catalog; HighBeam provides the entire library and some of the applications to help our users turn raw data into useful answers."
This is precisely where the rubber meets the road for the information seeker, Spain says. It's also the niche HighBeam is trying to serve.
Feeling the Need
In its brief history, HighBeam has provided three online services to researchers: eLibrary, an online subscription archive of 28 million documents from more than 2,200 sources; encyclopedia.com, an eLibrary-powered online encyclopedia that allows users to browse or search the Columbia University Encyclopedia; and Researchville, a customizable meta-search tool that allows users to simultaneously search multiple information sources within a category (such as search engines, news sources, or discussion groups) and receive relevancy-ranked results. (HighBeam purchased eLibrary and Encyclopedia.com from Toronto-based Tucows in August 2002. Researchville was introduced in August 2003 as a beta test site for meta-search and customization technologies.) eLibrary is primarily a subscription tool, available at a rate of $99.95 per year, although "many of its features are available at no cost to the more than two million people who visit regularly," Spain adds. The company's other two online services have been free to users.
By the end of January, however, the company plans to have merged all three services into what Spain describes as "a single, multi-function service that will combine powerful free tools and content with a moderately priced subscription service supported, in part, by advertising" under the new HighBeam Research brand.
"Online researchers need more than just a list of search results from the free Web," Spain says, noting that access to premium content, plus the ability to organize and publish findings in a meaningful way, will drive the future of online research. "The other key driver will be those services that make it possible to mine the depth and breadth of online resources, whether free and publicly available or hidden in a small, proprietary online service," he continues. "The next generation of research tools must focus on using technology to do the first cut at organizing and winnowing the data. Then we need to find tools that make it easy to apply human intelligence to those results to make them useful.
"Our primary focus is adding a simple, but powerful, set of tools to our services that will give users more control over their entire research process," Spain concludes. "We aim to create tools that will enable customers to search multiple sources simultaneously, and then organize and deliver—some would call it publish—the answers to their questions."
On the Road to Ubiquity?
So, where does HighBeam fit within the bigger econtent picture? On this point, Spain is clear: "HighBeam wants to be the very best at providing customers with pretty good answers to serious business, educational, and personal questions. Our role is to serve the huge market that finds Google inadequate for its serious research needs and finds the high-end services overkill. With the launch of our new service, our biggest competitor will be Google and the perception that you can do serious research on it. Google is a wonderful service, but it is increasingly focused on facilitating ecommerce." HighBeam's new seravice will launch with both Web search and the ability to search the HighBeam eLibrary. Some content will be available for free (including abstracts to fee-based content) while other content will require a subscription for full access.
Spain is equally outspoken about the future of the online market research space and his company's place within it. "End users are, in many ways, harder to satisfy than enterprises, so we have to make it intuitive and easy to use," he says. "Many people still don't believe that individuals will pay for anything online. They will, but they won't pay for what information providers have traditionally delivered for free: access, search, and content. When they do pay, they won't pay much. Except for highly specialized information valuable to a small number of enterprises—for which there will always be a market—the market for general content as a standalone product is going to go to zero."
Consider yourself warned.