ReportLinker’s open source market research engine
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.
Google Trends for Market Research?
Although Google got a lot of press earlier this month when it introduced its “hot trends” function that identified the fastest growing search statements daily, I still much prefer the older
Google Trends to track the frequency of searches over time, and have recently been considering its value in helping discover new markets.
What I think is the most interesting is that on Google trends you can view results broken down by cities and regions. You can also choose what time period you’d like to see the trend graphed for. So, for instance, in the image here, the phrase “carbon trading” was searched most often in the city of Mumbai India, followed by Sydney Australia and then Delhi, India.This regional breakdown adds meaning and value. For instance, if you were thinking of entering the carbon trading market, and wanted a lead as to what parts of the globe are most attuned to this concept and where people are looking for more information, this could be potentially valuable information.
The best words and phrases to use on Google Trends would be those that are more “packed” with meaning (e.g. “sustainability”; “social networks”) and where you could reasonably presume that a search implies that it’s a hot topic/and or people are thinking about it, and/or there is some demand for learning more. You could do this for product names as well, of course. And combining words or phrases (via commas) could also be used to help ensure that the word/phrase is in the context you want: e.g. “social networks,” “web 2.0″
Keep in mind, though, that the trends site is what Google calls a “Google Labs” product which means that it’s still in an early stage of development and that you can’t really count on what you discover as a sure thing. But I still think it’s pretty neat to consider for possible leads as one more input when doing initial new market research
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MarketResearch.com acquires TBI’s Profound
If you haven’t heard it yet, this is a very interesting development, and reported here in Information Today’s Econtent.
I’ll be posting some thoughts on the implications of this for business researchers and the market research industry shortly.
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