New Investor search engine launched

Here is something a little different; if you are into tinkering with stock market trading or investing, perhaps you are a serious investor or you just like to check on the wellbeing of your shares – either way you need to know the comings and goings of business so this could be the web site for you. A new search engine named The Scannery has just been released onto the Internet. This search engine specialises in allowing users to search the Web sites of more than 11,000 publicly traded companies around the world.

The developer says this is a new breed of search site that is a very powerful and useful tool for investors in particular. What differentiates this search site from others is its ability to focus on investor specific targets broken down by country and industry sector.

What is the difference between this search engine and say, Google or others?

The system developers, TimbukOne, say the difference between The Scannery and other search engines is that where other search engines find and list every Web site that has a match, The Scannery focuses on, and returns results, solely on investor-specific targets which are then further broken down by country and industry sector.

A person using this system can also search by country, special group or industry sectors. For example a stock market investor can find results from companies whose shares are actually tradable on a stock market. The Scannery searches the Web sites of 11,000 or more public companies in more than 40 countries. These can include companies rated by Standard & Poors known as the S&P 1500, S&P 500, Euro 400 and Global 100.

What if someone searching the Internet isn’t quite sure who or what they are looking for?

Users can search using “fuzzy logic”, write a word phonetically, or use synonyms. The search results can then be sorted by relevance, number of hits, document date, or document size.

The Scannery will also search for virtually any file made available on the Web site of a public company, not only Internet (HTML) files, but also Word processing documents, Spreadsheet files, PowerPoint presentation files, PDF files and even the contents of Archive files. Perhaps the most powerful feature is that the search engine can consolidate all search results by company Web site, and even find all hits within all documents on any specific Web site.

Who can the Scannery search up and find on the Internet?

Apparently all public companies have been included. In the bigger countries like America, the top 1500 companies are included, while in smaller markets like Japan for instance, the top 500 companies are searched.

Are there other similar types of Search Engines out there?

As far as the developers are aware, The Scannery is the only investor-specific search engine, which exclusively searches publicly, traded companies in the world today. Owners of The Scannery say they generate their revenue through branding, co-branding and integration into third-party Web sites.

The Scannery has been developed by Jos Pols. Another first under his belt was the development of the leading free-to-air financial Web site, BFANet.com.

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