Online articles from May 1999

Online archives from May 1999

The Ultimate, Original Search Engine.(Internet search engine developments)
May 1, 1999... Where did search engines come from? Are they really new? In this special issue on search engines, we have considered search engines from every possible angle but two. Is there an original, or first, search engine? And what would be the ultimate...

InSite 2 Announced by Gale Group.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... The Gale Group announced the release of InSite 2, a Web-based, business intelligence subscription product that replaces the InSite and InSite Pro full-text collections. Unlimited email alerts, greater control over searches, and a simplified,...

UMI Acquires New Name.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... Reflecting its changing direction since a marketing alliance with Dow Jones, UMI has been renamed to Bell & Howell Information and Learning. The change is intended to better identify the company's commitment to providing information to...

Disclosure Removed from Dialog.(Primark's Disclosure database)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... Primark Corporation removed the Disclosure database (File 100) from Dialog in February 1999, due to an inability of both sides to reach an agreement on renewal of the contract. The database will continue to be available directly from Primark...

Dialog Reports 1998 Results.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... In a press release announcing its 1998 results, Dialog showed 1998 revenues of $284.1 million, and an operating profit of $42.6 million. The report acknowledged that the "... radical change in pricing [DialUnits] proved to be more problematic...

Qpass Shared Transaction Network.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... Qpass Content Transaction Network is a new service that enables the sale of digital content over the Internet, introduced by Qpass in conjunction with four content providers-the Wolf Street Journal, the U.S. Department of Commerce, IDG Industry...

Enhanced Dow Jones InfoPro Alliance Program.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... Dow Jones Interactive Publishing has announced plans-in-progress to update and enhance its InfoPro Alliance Program. The program, under the direction of former Dialog staffer, Anne Caputo, provides support for information professionals and...

Wilson Biographies Plus.
May 1, 1999... Wilson Biographies Plus combines Wilson biographical databases with Web technology to offer profiles that feature hotlinks to new information as it is published in more than 4,000 periodicals. Users can access biographical profiles and link to...

Kiplinger Special Service.
May 1, 1999... Kiplinger Special Service (KSS) is a new Web-based, interactive forecasting and query service from The Kiplinger Washington Editors, Inc. (http://special.kiplinger.com). The service is an enhanced, online version of the weekly Kiplinger Letter,...

Compbook.(Data Downlink Corp.)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... Compbook is a new Web-based business information service from Data Downlink Corporation that provides comprehensive, comparative analysis, competitive intelligence information, and customized reports on more than 18,000 public companies...

XML API.
May 1, 1999... Data Downlink has also released XML API; a framework that permits programmatic access to most of the 60-plus databases under license. The API (Application Programming Interface) helps Webmasters and intranet developers integrate business and...

COMTEX has formed partnerships with Nelson Information.(Nelson to provide business and information content)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... COMTEX, a global financial and business news distributor, has formed partnerships with Nelson Information, a Thomson Financial Company, and COMLINE Business Data Inc., to provide its distributors business and financial content from Nelson's,...

COMTEX.(news distribution channels)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... COMTEX news is also now available through World Reporter (http://www.worldreporter.com) on Dow Jones Interactive Publishing (http://www.dowjones.com), Dialog (http://www.dialog.com), and Financial Times services (http://www.ft.com)....

Charles Schwab & Co.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... Charles Schwab & Co. has released an enhanced version of its SchwabAlerts email service, which lets users customize their Schwab interaction and control their online investments based on their own preferences, using either email or Web online...

Financial Information Services.(enters distribution agreement with Sector Inc.)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... Financial Information Services (FIS), publisher of Moody's Business and Financial Information, has formed an agreement with Sector, Inc., a subsidiary of the Securities Industry Automation Corporation (SIAC), to electronically deliver FIS'...

Access Asia.(Profound's database covers consumer and industrial market information from China and the rest of Asia)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... Access Asia is a collection of market research reports found on Profound's ResearchLine that covers industrial and consumer markets in China and Hong Kong, plus pan-Asian commercial intelligence. ResearchLine's China Contact market analysis...

Hoover Online.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... Hoover's Online has signed a distribution and ecommerce agreement with AltaVista Search Service to include Hoover's Company Capsules and Hoover's Company Profiles in AltaVista's investment area. For free, AltaVista users can access Hoover's...

Thomson Financial Services.
May 1, 1999... Thomson Financial Services (TFS) has acquired The Takeover Stock Report (http://www.takeoverstockreport.com), an Internet-based information service that reports the status of stocks involved in takeovers, mergers, and acquisitions. The service...

WorldlyInvestor.com.
May 1, 1999... Under a content syndication agreement, WorldlyInvestor.com will now be distributed by Zacks, an investment research provider for institutional and individual investors, financial Web sites, Internet newspapers, and online magazines....

EDGAR.
May 1, 1999... EDGAR Online has launched a University Edition of its service for law and business schools at New York University. The University Edition lets colleges and universities offer intranet and extranet access to the various premium EDGAR Online...

LIVEDGAR Version 99.1.1.
May 1, 1999... LIVEDGAR Version 99.1.1 is now available free from Global Securities Information. This new version lets users search for SEC documents with a fast full-text search engine, includes the '33 Act DEALS Registration Database, allows full-text...

ABSA Bank and Rand Merchant Bank.
May 1, 1999... Under a recent agreement, economic research from South African-based ABSA Bank and Rand Merchant Bank has been added to the Quest Economics database. Publications now available in Quest Economics include Rand Merchant Bank Weekly Economic...

Netscape Communications Corporation.
May 1, 1999... Netscape Communications Corporation and Thomson Financial Services have announced an agreement to make Thomson Investors Network Real-Time Quotes the exclusive provider of realtime market quotes for the Personal Finance Channel Netscape...

Investor Education Center.
May 1, 1999... The Investor Education Center has been added to Thomson Investors Network's Web site to help individual investors understand investing and investing management. Instruction capsules address Concepts of Investing, Brokers, Mutual Funds, Options...

NetMind Technologies, Inc.
May 1, 1999... NetMind Technologies, Inc. has released Version 3.0 of its Enterprise Minder service, which tracks changes to Web-based information on intranets, extranets, and the Internet. Version 3.0 offers new tracking, personalization, and security...

WebZinger 6.0.(ImaginOn Inc.'s search engine now available)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... WebZinger 6.0 is a supra-search engine from ImaginOn, Inc. available for electronic purchase at http://www.unboxed.com or http://www.webzinger.com for $44.95. The software searches, locates, evaluates, downloads, formats, and plays back search...

Verity, Inc.(Intelliseek Inc.'s BullsEye search product incorporates Verity Inc.'s search and retrieval technology)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... Verity, Inc.'s search and retrieval technology has been incorporated into IntelliSeek, Inc.'s BullsEye search and retrieval product. IntelliSeek is using the Verity Developer's Kit for information processing and linguistic analysis that will...

ScheduleEarth.com.(ScheduleEarth.com launches new portal)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... ScheduleEarth.com (http://www.scheduleearth.com) has launched a portal dedicated to personal and professional development on the Internet. The portal provides free access to thousands of seminars, conferences, continuing education classes,...

Engineering News-Record.
May 1, 1999... Engineering News-Record (ENR), a weekly business publication for the construction industry, has added a Headline News feature to its Web site (http://www.enr.com). Headline News offers breaking news from ENR's editorial staff plus other news...

Axiom.(Information on version 1.02 of the Institute of Physics Publishing's Axiom online research service)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... Version 1.02 of the Institute of Physics Publishing's Axiom online research service now offers BibTeX and other bibliographic managers including ProCite, Reference Manager, and EndNote--complementing search output options originally available...

Current Patents Gazette.(Current Patents Gazette, a weekly drug industry publication, is now available in PDF or Oracle database format for electronic delivery)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... Current Patents Gazette, a weekly publication on competitive intelligence in the drug industry, was launched in print form last year and is also now available in PDF or Oracle database format for electronic delivery. Following the Thursday...

AIChE journal.(American In)(American Institute of Chemical Engineers' (AIChE) AIChE journal is now available on ScienceDirect)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... The American Institute of Chemical Engineers' (AIChE) AIChE journal is now available on ScienceDirect (SD) for AIChE subscribers and SD subscribers at universities, research institutions, and corporations. The Journal documents advances in...

European Patent Office.(Verity Inc. and the European Patent Office form strategic relationship to build freely-accessible patent database on the Internet)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... Verity, Inc. and the European Patent Office have formed a strategic relationship to build the largest freely-accessible patent database on the Internet--to be called esp@cenet. The database will give users access to approximately 30 million...

MicroPatent.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... MicroPatent's Special Collection of over 25 million full patent copies is now commercially available from the MicroPatent Web site (http://www.micropat.com). The Special Collection includes individual country documents from more than 45...

MEDICAL/PHARMACEUTICAL/HEALTHCARE.(BIOSIS invites researchers to test previews of its MethodsFinder research service)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... BIOSIS is inviting researchers to test previews of its MethodsFinder service, which is intended to help researchers find the best and most current information on laboratory methods and techniques. The database contains data from 1998 and 1999...

journals@Ovid.(Journals@Ovid adds 300th journal title to its sci-tech-med database)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... The 300th journal title was added to journals@Ovid, which according to Ovid, makes Journals@Ovid the largest and most comprehensive sci-tech-med SGML full-text database in the world. The database was launched in June 1998 with 80 journal titles...

BullsEye Pro.(InPharm joins forces with the Oxford Knowledge Company to sell and market IntelliSeek's BullsEye Pro search software)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... InPharm has joined forces with the Oxford Knowledge Company to sell and market IntelliSeek's BullsEye Pro search software. A free trial of BullsEye Pro is included with InPharm's recent release of a CD-ROM promoting InPharm's new free...

American Health Information Management Association.(American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) joins National Information Center for Health Services Administration)
May 1, 1999... The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) has joined a consortium of healthcare organizations as a partner in the National Information Center for Health Services Administration. The Center is a comprehensive resource for...

Knowledge Host.(Knowledge Host, Aries Systems' client/server solution, provides capability to deliver electronic medical library on intranets)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... Knowledge Host is Aries Systems' Linux-based client/server solution that lets librarians and system administrators deliver an electronic medical library on their own intranet. Databases Knowledge Host supports include MEDLINE, CINAHL AIDSLINE,...

SNOMED RT.(College of American Pathologists tests SNOMED International 's reference terminology SNOMED RT)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... SNOMED RT, a concept-based reference terminology from SNOMED International, is undergoing beta testing for eventual release to the healthcare community by the College of American Pathologists. It has been under development in collaboration with...

OCLC and Public Affairs Information Services.(OCLC and Public Affairs Information Services sign letter of intent to merge)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... OCLC and Public Affairs Information Services (PAIS), have signed a letter of intent that could lead, following negotiations, to the merger of PAIS and OCLC. The merger would result in OCLC providing access to PAIS databases via the Internet,...

Primark Corporation.(Primark Corp. acquires)(Company Fundamental Data business and Extel brand from the Financial Times Group)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... Primark Corporation has acquired the Company Fundamental Data business and the Extel brand from the Financial Times Group, part of Pearson plc, for approximately $32 million in cash. Included in the transaction is a one-year agreement with...

Micropatent.(Micropatent L.L.C. acquires Optipat Inc., a patent information company)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... Micropatent, LLC has acquired Optipat Inc., a Washington, DC-based patent information company. The acquisition expands Micropatent's product offerings in the patent and trademark areas. Optipat will continue to offer its complete line of file...

Blackwell Retail Ltd.(Blackwell Retail Ltd. confirms offer to acquire W. Heffer & Sons Ltd. in Cambridge, UK)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... Blackwell Retail Ltd. has confirmed its offer to acquire W. Heffer & Sons Ltd. in Cambridge, UK. The Heffers' Board is recommending Blackwell's offer to their shareholders. Both companies are family-owned and have specialized in academic and...

Ohio Library and Information Network.(Ohio Library and Information Network makes contract with)(Responsive Database Services Inc.)(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... The Ohio Library and Information Network (OhioLINK) has selected Responsive Database Services, Inc. (RDS) to provide the RDS databases, Business & Industry and Contemporary Women's Issues, to its collection of more than 70 databases....

MCB University Press.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... MCB University Press has announced that AMIGOS Bibliographic Council of Dallas, Texas has become the first U.S. multilibrary network to subscribe to MCB's Emerald electronic database of management journals. AMIGOS has signed a three-year...

Information Handling Services Group Inc.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... Information Handling Services Group Inc. (IHS Group) has acquired the CenBASE/Materials Information Service Business from CenTOR Software Corporation. The CenBASE/Materials Information Service Business will become part of IHS Group's D.A.T.A....

SilverPlatter and Dawson Information Services Group.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... SilverPlatter and Dawson Information Services Group have announced an agreement to link SilverPlatter's bibliographic databases to the full text of journals offered through Information Quest. The agreement will also permit linking to full text...

1999 ISI/ASIS Citation Analysis Research Grant.
May 1, 1999... The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and the American Society for Information Science (ASIS) is accepting proposals for the 1999 ISI/ASIS Citation Analysis Research Grant, which supports research based on citation analysis by...

University of Michigan School of Information.
May 1, 1999... Faculty and students of the University of Michigan School of Information have received a $189,026 grant to explore how people use networked information and how public libraries can capitalize on this way of spreading information. The grant is...

PEOPLEWARE.
May 1, 1999... BIOSIS has appointed Linda Sacks Senior Vice President, Marketing & Sales. Sacks previously served as Marketing Director for Elsevier Science, where she managed several international product lines including EMBASE and Geobase. Prior to...

Chief information officers survey.
May 1, 1999... In a recent survey, 75% of 1,400 chief information officers surveyed said they research topics of special interest when accessing the Web for personal use. Thirty-one percent also arrange travel, 30% purchase computer equipment, 29% purchase...

Business Communications Co., Inc.
May 1, 1999... According to a soon-to-be-released Business Communications Co., Inc. study (RG-049U Electronic Mail: Technologies, Applications, What's Ahead), an estimated 78 trillion email messages were transmitted in 1998. In a study with conflicting...

AltaVista.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... AltaVista is now a separate company, the AltaVista Company, which has been spun-off from Compaq. A public offering will probably be in the future. On the international side, AltaVista has added AltaVista Germany to its international network of...

Britannica.
May 1, 1999... Britannica is the new name for the eBLAST (which stood for Encyclopaedia Britannica Links and Search Tool) directory. Even ,earlier, eBLAST was known as eBIG (Encyclopaedia Britannica's Internet Guide).

Excite.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... Excite is being acquired by @Home, the broadband and cable Internet access provider.

Google!
May 1, 1999... Google! has moved from its Alpha release to a Beta release, along with a cleaner look on its front page. It also now supports phrase searching using the standard 'double quotes" to identify a phrase, and it allows use of the minus symbol (-)...

HotBot.
May 1, 1999... HotBot has incorporated the top ten hits from Direct Hit into its regular search results if the output is set to ten and there are results available from Direct Hit.

HotBot News.
May 1, 1999... HotBot News now supports phrase searching (which is actually the default search), the AND and OR Boolean operators, and nesting. It still does not support any NOT operation or the plus or minus notation.

Inktomi.
May 1, 1999... Inktomi has announced new Universal Search capabilities that will search an expanded set of databases, including news, company data, stock quotes, product information, and RealNames. None of the Inktomi partners are using this at press time,...

LookSmart.
May 1, 1999... LookSmart has signed an agreement with Direct Hit to use the Direct Hit popularity technology.

Lycos.
May 1, 1999... Lycos has added a searchable database of Web-accessible database of MP3 audio files, much to the chagrin of some music industry executives. It's available directly at [less than]http:llmp3.lycos.com/[greater than] greater than. Lycos also...

MSN Web Search.
May 1, 1999... MSN Web Search has announced that it will change its underlying database from Inktomi to AltaVista. They also announced that they will use LookSmart as their directory. Neither of these changes had occurred as of press time.

Northern Light.
May 1, 1999... Northern Light has announced the addition of investment and market research reports from the Investext and Marklntel databases to its Special Collections. The reports can be purchased by the page and in their entirety. Another Special...

Yahoo!
May 1, 1999... Yahoo! announced plans to acquire the free home page service of GeoCities. It also introduced its express submission service, where for $199 they promise expedited 'consideration" of submissions. Users report better success with getting listed...

New Search Engine Book.
May 1, 1999... Randolph Hock's Extreme Searcher's Guide to Web Search Engines: A Handbook for the Serious Searcher is now available from Information Today, Inc.

New Search Engine Numbers.
May 1, 1999... The March statistical comparison of search engines at Search Engine Showdown [less than]http://www.notess.com/search[greater than] shows Northern Light still in the lead with the largest number of search results, followed by AltaVista, HotBot,...

New Search Engine Standards.
May 1, 1999... Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch has initiated a Search Engine Standards project with the aim of encouraging standardization of commands across the search engines. See [less than] http://searchenginewatch.internet.com/standards[greater...

Search Engines in the internet age.
May 1, 1999... Online has certainly become mainstream. A decade ago, the talk was all about end-user searching, but it never took off with the general public any more than CompuServe and America Online could grab the attention of the masses without the...

WEB SEARCH ENGINES features and commands.
May 1, 1999... With a half-dozen or so large general Web search engines, it is far from easy to remember which one provides which features and how those features are implemented. Add to that the fact that several search engines have both simple and advanced...

CRAWLING UNDER THE HOOD.
May 1, 1999... Danny Sullivan is the editor of Search Engine Watch (http://searchenginewatch.corn). He covers developments with search engines within the site and through his free monthly newsletter, the Search Engine Report. An Update on Search Engine...

Results ranking in Web Search Engines.
May 1, 1999... World Wide Web search engines have become the most heavily-used on line services, with millions of searches performed each day. Their popularity is due, in part, to their ease of use, which stems primarily from their use of relevancy searching...

Choosing an intranet Search engine.
May 1, 1999... talking about search engines conjures up notions of the big Internet search engines like AltaVista, Infoseek, and HotBot. However, search engines are also tools that can be used to index intranet content. As librarians, we need to know how to...

The future Search Web of Search.
May 1, 1999... Chris Sherman is the Web Search Guide for The Mining Co. Internet Guide network, http:/ /websearch.miningco.com. He holds an MA from Stanford University in Interactive Educational Technology, and has worked in the Internet/multimedia industry...

NLP meets the jab berwocky.
May 1, 1999... Natural Language Processing in Information Retrieval Searching is a language game. Find just the right combination of words and you have the key to the black box of answers that we call a database. Guess wrong, and the box remains mum, or...

META SEARCH ENGINES.
May 1, 1999... The single, most frequent piece of search advice for using Web search engines is to always search more than one engine to answer your question. No two engines are the same--each offers a unique set of search features and indexes or crawls the...

A Web Search Trifecta.
May 1, 1999... Bill Mickey is associate editor of ONLINE magazine. Keeping Tabs on Search Engine Features & Technology A serious searcher knows that more effective results come from the same Web search query cast over several search engines. One...

Rising Relevance in Search Engines.
May 1, 1999... Back in the medieval days of the Internet, when a search used engine was still the software used to access bibliographic or other databases with no connection to the Internet, there was some fascinating research on statistical algorithms for...

Spotlight on Search Submissions.
May 1, 1999... BOOKMARK CENTRAL continues to receive submissions and we're uploading them to the BOOKMARK CENTRAL site as fast as possible. Topics recently submitted include Economic Espionage, Consumer Health, Breast and Prostate Cancer, and Document...

Realistic Approaches to Enigmatic Copyright Issues.
May 1, 1999... The most disconcerting aspect of copyright is the ambiguity of existing laws. We understand, and have so stated in several of our columns, that copyright is an issue of interpretation. Some organizations, regardless of profit or educational...

Information Visualization Product Developments.
May 1, 1999... My last column (January 1999 ONLINE) described some of the underlying principles and basic research relating to information visualization--the graphical or pictorial display of search results. This issue's column continues that theme by...

Euro Currents.
May 1, 1999... While some worry about becoming Y2K-compliant by January 1, 2000, Europeans worried about another compliancy a year earlier. On January 1, 1999, all but four of the 15 European Union member countries converted their currency to the euro. Opting...

Web Measurers Wrestle with Methodologies, Each Other.
May 1, 1999... Media Metrix is an "according to" company. It's in a class with J.D. Powers, Nielsen, and Arbitron, which are regularly cited in newsreports and ads, as the source-"according to..." --for some authoritative product rating. For TV programs, it's...

Intranets: Librarians, Dive In!
May 1, 1999... Intranets have become part of the working lives of librarians and other in formation professionals everywhere, as evidenced in January ONLINE'S special intranet issue. An important conclusion drawn from that issue plants intranets firmly in the...