In doing some research for a wrap up of trends in the market research report aggregator business, I came upon a fascinating new site, out of Lyon France, called ReportLinker. ReportLinker is a subscription based site that calls itself an “open source market research search engine.” It has created a crawler to find and index over a million market research reports from governmental agencies, trade associations, research centers, and others with open source reports, and made them fully searchable on its site. ReportLinker’s crawler even is customized to perform deep web searching on specified sites discovered by the firm as containing valuable market research studies.

The site is very new—it was just launched this past March—and I’m in the process of testing it for an article in the July issue of The Information Advisor. So far I’ve been impressed with ReportLinker’s advanced search capabilities, as well as the quality of many of its reports. There are some small problems too (including some translation issues), and the service is not cheap, but I think this is a very significant development for market researchers and is an example of new types of open source document aggregation sites we may see in the near future.

One issue that I wonder about is how some of the market research publishers will react when they discover that the reports that they are publishing for free are being resold by a profit making firm. ReportLinker’s CEO Ben Carpano told me that the fees subscribers pay cover use of its value added search engine’s functions, and not for the reports itself, and that so far the firm has not received any complaints, but will certainly honor any requests not to index reports.