Thomson Beta-Testing WebPlus Optimized Internet Search Engine

From George Pike’s article:

The Thomson Corp. (www.thomson.com) is expanding the beta testing of its WebPlus Internet search engine. Initially released in very limited markets in August, WebPlus is now available to users of Thomson West’s Westlaw and Thomson Scientific’s Web of Science information services. Thomson expects to roll out WebPlus among all its product lines—Health, Financial, Science, and Legal—with “walk-up” editions available free on the Web through Thomson products like Findlaw.com.

WebPlus used human editors at Thomson as well as proprietary search technology to create an Internet search engine that targets and prioritizes its results as an adjunct to Thomson’s data products. The WebPlus Legal search engine, currently being beta tested in law schools and selected law firms, focuses the query results on government, educational, nonprofit, and commercial legal information Web sites that complement its Westlaw database. Thomson Scientific’s WebPlus does the same, albeit with the focus on science Web sites that complement Web of Science.

The goal of WebPlus, according to Barbara McGivern, vice president of product management for Thomson Web, is a search product that provides results that are optimized for each particular user group. Customers from all of the Thomson product lines wanted to supplement the proprietary database results with relevant, professional Web sites, she indicated, but were struggling to deal with Internet information overload. “Our customers wanted a better Web,” she said.

Minor Quibble

The total number of hits on the Google search “rocket aerodynamics” the way it is written WITH quotation marks is somewhere between 1600-1700 hits. When you review each result, the Google dupe filter comes appears after 182. With the dupe filter off, we see 378 results. There is no way to determine if 1600-1700 results exist.

Results can vary from minute to minute and it’s important to remember that with any web engine these numbers are estimates. We think this search clearly illustrates that point and the numbers not always telling the full story.

Searching rocket aerodynamics without the quotation marks is an IMPLIED “AND” search (rocket AND aerodynamics) and returns (when we tested, again numbers vary) about 360,000 results. However, no way to no for sure since Google only shows 1000 results. In this search, the Google dupe filter came on at 801 and cut off at 904.

Source: InfoToday NewsBreaks

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 and is filed under Information Industry, Search News, Web Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.