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MARKET POSITION

The great promise of the Internet is that millions of sources are now making valuable content directly available for the world to see. Yet, this promise is empty if information cannot be located, is not indexed, or is drowned in a sea of useless spam.

Professionals and business people have rapidly learned over the past few years how frustrating Internet search can be. A highly valuable document, report, white paper, or article may be only a URL away, but lie unrecognized. Data may be available but can only be found by those who already know where it is. The pages of e-commerce providers may offer valuable clues to their competitive standing. However, few options exist for assuring this material can be found. Even when material is found, there is no way to know if it was the best available. All too often it isn't.

Can these wasted hours on the part of professionals be salvaged and can authenticity be brought back into the search process? Fiducité is dedicated to that goal. We recognize that within a few years virtually all analytical and professional sources of content will be on the web, offering instant access to the world's largest information database, if it can be located.

But Fiducité will do more than just find information. Many corporate executives don't have the time to use even good search engines. What they need are products that extract the best of the web for their particular need, profession, or project. They also require a "watch" service that monitors new material on the Internet in their field and brings it to their attention.

We meet these needs in each domain area by employing specialized technology and databases and by utilizing Guides who are knowledgeable about financial services. The combination of technology and people will bring together the best features of the high volume automated approaches from the Internet and the truly precise, personalized, abilities of reference librarians and industry research analysts.

Fiducité will solve the problem professionals have in achieving the potential of the Internet as a source of content.

Why Does This Problem Exist?

No one planned that the Internet would become the world's largest corporate library, but it has. Because of this unexpected development, the tools normally expected in libraries do not exist, such as separate collections of important documents or card catalogs. Moreover, corporate and professional users have very different needs than do consumers. They need to know the source of information, they need objective coverage, and they need details.

The public search engines have never been designed for the needs of professionals and as a result, they don't serve those needs very well. They are focused on serving consumers or on finding an object if its existence is already known. As a result, leading public search engines focus on large numbers instead of precision. Their customer base is consumers and their revenue model is advertising. They are not focused on assisting business people. Because they index so much, they've begun to employ pay-for-placement strategies, which will make professional search even worse.

Another issue is the "invisible web." Millions of backup documents or databases that require site search or registration are often the most relevant documents for professionals but are ignored by public search engines. Algorithms such as Google's that reflect popularity also make it harder to find valuable but non-mainstream material. In addition, re-crawling may be done very infrequently, especially for sites that are small or that don't offer e-commerce.

Word match and even concept matching algorithms leave much to be desired. End users consistently find themselves viewing duplicate pages, erroneous retrievals, secondary source references, or material whose value they cannot judge. Words mean different things, especially across professional domains such as science, medicine, business, engineering, and so on. Industry-specific ontologies or lexicons are not used in any way by general purpose search engines today.

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