Business publishing:

Driving revenues through search

HEADLINES

• Business publishers continue to see revenues move from print to online
• Finding the right combination of online content and services for the target community is a key issue
• For almost all online communities, search is the default information access tool

This article provides a summary of how a business publisher, Aspermont Ltd, is using search to build additional services for their target communities.

DETAILS

Community needs
Specialist professional communities are no different to the rest of us. Their use of search has become an established (and for many a critical) part of their daily information seeking workflow.

Some business publishers have found it difficult to deal with the importance that their target communities attach to search. Smaller publishers struggle to prioritize search as a strategic part of their online offering. Larger publishers often find conflict in the "Google: Friend of Foe" debate, relying on Google for traffic, yet competing with Google as a starting point on the Web, and in some cases for advertising dollars.

Stepping up to the plate
Aspermont Ltd, a leading publisher of mining, oil and gas, and construction information, decided to tackle the issue head-on by adding a web search option to their portfolio of subscription news and free-to-air information services.

Open attitudes, open source solutions
The plan was to provide a "best-of-web" search experience for Aspermont's highly specialized communities, combining the latest search technology with the deep industry experience of Aspermont's editorial team. Ambitions went beyond simply limiting web search to certain industry specific Web sites. The resulting search experiences (which as of February 2010, just a few months after launch, were taking more than 100,000 search requests a month) provide an up-to-date and highly customized view of the Web. This is helping Aspermont to position themselves as a default starting point on the Web for professionals in the industries they serve, and it is securing substantial, niche online audiences valued by their trade advertising clients.

Using their advantages
Specialist publishers, especially those reliant on trade advertising, face significant new challenges in the online world. Yet when it comes to search, they have some important advantages – their knowledge of the industry and the target audience, and the ability to focus exclusively on that audience, a luxury not shared by general search engines. Aspermont has leveraged these advantages and created a search experience, through the use of industry ontologies and categorization techniques, that is very specific to their communities. Visitors to Aspermont properties from within target industries perceive immediately that the search function has been built specifically for them.

Aspermont’s new vertical search functionality is also attracting new audiences from their target sectors in other parts of the world.

The economics of Aspermont's business plan precluded commercially licensed search products as there was a need to deal with tens of millions of documents and a significant concurrent query load. So, with Search Technologies' help, Aspermont turned to open source and a search application was built using Solr Lucene.

Web search drives traffic
The additional Web traffic that Aspermont's vertical search services have attracted is highly qualified.  A search destination obviously configured for mining professionals (for example) does not attract casual, untargeted Web traffic. Further, through the use of productivity tools such as downloadable widgets and syndicated search boxes, Aspermont is further embedding itself in its users' daily workflow.

New trade advertising options
As most trade advertisers know through their use of Google AdWords, Web users can be effectively targeted using search. Specialist publishers have traditionally provided excellent demographic targeting for their advertisers.  Aspermont now offer their clients a compelling mixture of a highly qualified audience combined with the targeting of individual users based on search requests.

Aspermont use Search Technologies' Solr-based hosted search service.