A Niche Search Engine for eBusiness

eBizSearch is a new experimental search engine that focuses on an important niche market. It concentrates on those articles and information produced by commercial and academic organisations about e-Business.

The “eBusiness Research Center” which manages the search engine is a resource and information clearinghouse for e-business.

eBusiness? Wasn't that the much heralded, but now long-gone fad that was supposed to wipe out traditional bricks and mortar commerce?

Well, both yes and no. Despite the spectacular failures of countless, but nonetheless dubious business enterprises selling everything from whale watching to hard rock music online, eBusiness is actually flourishing. It simply took a very different turn in the road to that envisioned and thrust down our throats by the hyped-up 20th century pundits and “experts”.

So how is eBizSearch different?

As a search engine, eBizSearch makes it easy to find information covering business and technical aspects of online business for those organisations considering the adoption of “on-line” technology within their business.

The search engine collects its information by crawling the websites of business organisations, government sites, research establishments, universities, and retrieves any facts, statistics, working papers, white papers, consulting reports, academic and magazine articles involving the area of eBusiness.

How much information can we expect to find with eBizSearch?

Right about now the eBusiness Research Centre search engine is said to currently index about 20,000 collected documents. While a few of these are not fully documented records they will contain links to other more complete records.

Some records contained in the search database will contain only hyperlinks to other documents that have been found and consolidated while searching or crawling yet other documents in the indexing process. This is similar to what Google does when it finds a document that may be accessible on the web, but cannot be indexed, for various reasons.

What type of response can a person using eBizSearch expect?

Searches will produce two types of results. The first, an overall result list that displays all relevant documents related to your query, and secondly a detailed result page for each individual document found.

Detailed results will also offer an abstract of the document, links to the full document and often it will list the author’s home page on the Internet. Often it will also include an "active bibliography," which is a list of closely related documents.

There is also a list of other articles that have been mentioned or cited within some other article. It then provides with links to those same citing articles if they are contained within the eBizSearch database.

If you are trying to find articles or information written by popular or creditable authors eBizSearch performs what is called “citation analysis” on all of the academic articles that it finds and then indexes. It lists the citations in order of their “citation rates” (the most cited articles are listed first). By doing this it attempts to make it easy to see which articles are considered most important to those people in the eBusiness research community.

Is there a charge available for using the search engine?

By and large it seems a remarkably fair system. Those articles available through the eBizSearch engine can be downloaded free of charge. However, some articles that are returned by a search may only contain an abstracts of the full article or document. In this case you might need to buy the full article directly from the source to get the complete document.

Who will use eBizSearch?

Even for those not particularly interested in eBusiness, it is worth taking a preview of eBizSearch. The way it produces its very “rich” results are a great demonstration of how search engines not only can, but also should, provide searchers with much more detailed and helpful information. Far more than current Internet search engine users are currently accustomed to getting in their results.

Where did eBizSearch come from?

eBizSearch is based on the CiteSeer technology from NEC labs. Originally the development team that built the software intended the original product as a search engine for computer science research papers and articles.

Arthur Hissey
Computer Research & Technology
www.crt.net.au