Now that Google has released its customized search engine (read about it here), there are all sorts of opportunities for anyone to easily create their own niche search engine covering only their most trusted, substantive sites. (Google isn’t the first to do this: a neat one called Rollyo has been around for a little while–it’s only problem: it’s not Google. Not that it’s not good, it just isn’t going to get the attention or traction. And most of us do like the Google search interface and protocols)

So, do you follow, for example the pet care industry and have 20 favorite sites? You can create a simple fast customized Google search engine that only searches those sites. This is only limited by your imagination. This can be a great tool for:

1. Making your searches more precise
2. Helping overcome information overload
3. Setting a filter to find those sources you find trusted and credible.

I’ve already begun working on an all purpose Business Research Engine. I’ve only just begun with 11 sites, but would like to end up at about 100, and then I will make it available on this blog. Here’s the link–as I say, it’s only just begun but try it out it to get the idea:

Business Research Engine

How about a few suggestions on trusted, solid credible business sites that I can add? I’m looking for ones that provide rich data on companies, industries, products, new technologies, business news, market research, and other substantive business information.

Would love to hear your suggestions, and look for this Business Research Engine to appear in the next week or so.

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I just came across an unusual but noteworthy searchable company directory site I had not encountered before. It’s called Manta, and it provides a pretty impressive listing of directory data on millions of public and private firms.

The information itself is provided by D&B, but the site is a creation of ECNext, an ecommerce firm located in Westerville, OH that was known for quite awhile as a firm that set up deals with market research providers to create a market research portal to resell and repackage market research reports. Over the last several years, ECNext has set up arrangements with a variety of other business information providers such as S&P and Gale.

Searching and viewing on Manta is free, but to get additional data fields on companies, you do need to register, which is pretty simple and of course free.

I’d say that the main competitor to Manta is Hoovers–and it’s worth searching both sites if you need basic company data and don’t want to pay for it. I’m planning on doing a head to head comparison of Manta vs. Hoovers in next month’s issue of The Information Advisor.

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A noteworthy development in the business information industry: Dow Jones has just purchased the 50% of Factiva owned by Reuters. Factiva will now be 100% owned by Dow Jones.

Factiva always seemed to be much more closely aligned with Dow Jones than Reuters, and in fact it was often easy to forget that it was a joint venture with Reuters

You can read the press release here

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I’m in the process of working on a book on how to effectively and credibly use blogs to do market research and track trends, (to be published by Paramount Market Publishing in 2007) so I was certainly pleased to discover this just released Forrester Research market report, titled: The Forrester Wave. Brand Monitoring.

There’s great stuff in the study comparing features and coverage on key blog monitoring vendors like BuzzMetrics,Umbria, Factiva and several others–but the funny thing is that the report is priced at $995 (a typical market research price for a market study) on the Forrester site; but BuzzMetrics is making it available as a free white paper download here, and telling site visitors that the report is available free, even though it’s a “$349″ value!

So, I don’t want to complain about getting a $995 or $349 report for free….but it does seem a bit odd…it may not help that BuzzMetrics is promoting on its site that “Forrester recently cited Nielsen BuzzMetrics as a Leader in its 2006 Brand Monitoring Wave™ Report. Overall, Forrester “found that the vendor has the strongest strategic vision and currently competes at a scale unmatched by any other competitor.”

I don’t question the objectivity of Forrester, nor its top notch researcher Peter Kim, but having once almost been hired by a major New England-based IT market research firm, and told that part of my compensation when researching and writing these would be based on any report sales I could make to those companies covered in the study (which made me decide that this was an inherent conflict of interest so I did not take the position), I think that given the conflict of interest problems that plagued the brokerage research industry, it doesn’t help the credibility of the research industry to have the firm that did the best in an independent market study be in the position (how did they get in that position?) to be able to offer an expensive report for free.

This is *kind of* a sideline to my recommending the report–it is a detailed, comprehensive and well put together study. I just wish someone would explain why there is no conflict of interest here; or at least, why they would not care about a perceived conflict.

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