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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

A. We compile a proprietary database from the Internet of only those pages that deal with financial services. Then we use the latest and best technology to find only those valuable documents dealing with the query at hand. Our guides will find and interpret those documents for our customers as needed.

Q. Do you include only Internet pages in your database?

A. Fiducité is the first firm to catalogue the Internet for professional use. However, we will also selectively add sources from private database sources, relevant news feeds and industry conferences. We will also be indexing material from some paid Internet databases to allow simultaneous search with Internet materials.

Q. Does Fiducité rely on artificial intelligence?

A. Fiducité uses a variety of sources and techniques to find relevant documents, some of which do employ advanced AI. However, the technology is not yet reliable enough to answer professional queries as well as humans can.

Q. What is the Fiducité domain area?

A. The global financial services industry, which includes all banks, brokers, insurance firms, investment companies, industry suppliers, and regulators. Also included are all documents about the industry written or sourced from third parties such as academics, consultants, the media, the trade press, and analysts.

Q. How can you do a better job than the public search engines?

A. Because our universe of documents is less than 1% of the web, we can add meta-data to the sites we cover to allow accurate retrieval without showing annoying off-topic sites or tens of thousands of results.

Q. Why won’t the Yahoo directory and the Open Directory take care of professionals’ needs?

A. Yahoo is a consumer entertainment engine which will be forced by the company's financial situation to cease investing in those assets, like their directory, that do not generate revenue. The Open Directory will never be complete because it is maintained by volunteers.

Q. Why is Fiducité’s Vertical Directory the best for professionals?

A. We bring a professional’s concerns and knowledge to the construction of the directory, which must be created and maintained manually. We include all financial institutions and we categorize them correctly.

Q. What about the so-called “invisible web”?

A. Public search engines fail to include databases, proprietary information, and sites that must be searched in a two-step process. In addition, their ranking systems, such as Google’s based on popularity, often fail to identify niche documents of high professional interest. The invisible web is estimated to be many times larger than the visible web. Fiducité’s objective is to find all of the material germane to its domain area.

Q. Some good sites require free registration to see material such as white papers. Can Fiducité handle that?

A. We plan to register ourselves on all appropriate sites and to transmit the existence of helpful documents to our customers, who can then register themselves.

Q: Is Fiducité a content aggregator?

A. No. Content aggregators sell access to proprietary databases that are controlled and that are generally not available for free on the public Internet. Our objective is to give clients the ability to find what is available on the public Internet.

Q. Why hasn’t an idea like Fiducité been done before?

A. It’s only recently that the Internet became the world’s largest library, especially for professionals. Moreover, growth will continue indefinitely, due to multi-media, cheap bandwidth, better publishing technology and archiving. Counting paid sources, all material intended for public consumption will be on the Internet in future years. Already, professionals realize that no information gathering effort is complete until the web has been checked. Yet, effective tools to do this did not exist until Fiducité was founded.

Q. What is the difference between your automated and non-automated products?

A. Our automated capabilities include both word search and AI-enabled queries. These are available both for self-service and for operation by Fiducité guides. Yet, the best findings are annotated queries done by our guides and which allow clients’ complex needs to be met optimally.

Q. What do the Fiducité “guides” do?

A. Our guides are expert at knowing where to go on the Internet to get the best material for any query within our domain area. They understand clients’ needs and could be thought of as “outsourced Internet reference librarians.”

Q. I think there’s no quality information on the Internet. How can Fiducité change that?

A. The Internet doesn’t have the answer to everything but it does have a fascinating array of helpful information on many topics. Frustration should decrease as our clients realize how powerful a source it can be, once effective retrieval is possible.

Q. What is the Fiducité Vertical Ontology?

A. Search is a complicated process that depends greatly upon the etymology of words and phrases and the correct understanding of industry jargon. For example, “central limit order book” are four very common words with a precise meaning in the context of ECNs, which is itself an industry acronym. We are compiling an industry Vertical Ontology of tens of thousands of words, phrases, proper nouns, meanings, synonyms, acronyms, and concepts to assure that our word and AI-enabled search know what they are looking for. Such an ontology is unavailable today.

Q. How often do you refresh your database?

A. It depends on the type of site, but in general every few days. We crawl a defined universe of about 15-20,000 sites instead of the millions that the public engines crawl and can therefore update far more often.

Q. How can you know which sites and documents are the best?

A. Fiducité will add meta-data to sites and pages to enable us to accurately assess and retrieve them. Generally, the Internet is unindexed and even those sites that do add key words usually abuse the privilege. We will counter that by adding our own indexing.

Q. Do you employ pay-for-placement in your directory or search results?

A. Emphatically NO. We serve our clients, who are interested in finding what they need not what others want them to see. We accept no advertising and, like a good library, exist only to serve our clients.

Q. Who should use Fiducité’s services?

A. Any professional or executive with an interest in this industry. This could include end users in financial institutions, technology vendors to the industry, market researchers, consultants, or reference librarians in corporate settings.

Q. Does Fiducité target consumers?

A. No. We focus exclusively on the needs of professionals in business.

Q. Does Fiducité provide financial information about stocks or companies?

A. No, our focus is on developments in the industry, not on financial data, which is widely available on the Internet from numerous sources.

Q. Does Fiducité cover the entire worldwide Internet?

A. Yes, our business is global from beginning to end. All countries are covered in our directory, search, query, detector, annotation, and ad hoc businesses. Our client base will span the globe, in parallel with the financial services industry.

Q. What languages does Fiducité operate in?

A. Fiducité’s directory includes sites in many languages. However, the search process is very sensitive to language, so in this respect we will restrict ourselves for the time being to English, which makes up perhaps 70% of all words on the Internet.

Q. When will Fiducité offer a product that covers other industries?

A. We plan to expand to other major industries in 2003. These could include integrated logistics, telecommunications, software, consumer goods, energy, retailing, and transportation.

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