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 Searching for business in real time
Tuesday, 10th November 2009
By
Diana Nutting
Article:
Biznar is not new, but I have only recently come across it. It is a free, publicly available deep web business search engine that uses advanced "federated search technology" to return results by submitting a search query - in real-time - to other search engines then collating, ranking and dropping duplicates of the results search portal that that searches business databases and resources in real time (http://www.biznar.com).
The owner, Deep Web Technologies (http://www.deepwebtech.com), claims that Biznar scans business websites, including blogs, news sites, patent sources, search engines and deep web sources, returning the most relevant results to one, easily navigable, ranked page. Similar to metasearch technologies, federated search performs real-time, parallel searches of multiple information sources, merging the results into one page.
The Advanced Search page allows researchers to select all sources or specific sources to search, and to search by article title, author, or publication year. Through its Alerts feature, Biznar can be set to automatically perform repeat searches, delivering the results to users’ email boxes
The coverage is not complete - for example a search in the area of advertising and marketing will search Advertising Age, marketresearch.com and KnowThis.com, while General Business has 13 sources. However within its limitations, it could prove a useful extra tool.
By Diana Nutting
Diana Nutting is a freelance information and knowledge management consultant, specialising in company and market information. She was previously Head of Information Strategy and Development at Business Link for London, where she was responsible for market intelligence, website content, customer research and knowledge management. Diana started her career as an academic librarian, before moving into market intelligence at, among others, Unilever and Parcelforce. She serves on the National Council of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.
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