The trips went off without a hitch (see “Going the Distance” a few weeks ago)! The first trip, AUCD conference Oct 31 – Nov 3rd, went extremely well.   AUCD Conference attendees were very pleased with the features in their new 2.0 search portal including:  clustering of search results,  saving or emailing of search results, and alerts.

At the 2010 Charleston Conference Nov 3rd – Nov 6th, our President, Abe Lederman, witnessed a real-time, head-to-head, battle between two of the top Discovery Service providers. With all companies competing for the best performance, and several hundred people in the audience, the battle was very interesting to watch.  Stay tuned, for a detailed account regarding Abe’s eye-opening experience.

Our VP of Business Development, Andy Alsop’s, and Jose Luis Andrade’s presentation went smoothly. The most important part of the trip was the conversations with industry experts. Speaking with researchers, librarians, and students allows Deep Web Technologies to build products that address the needs of these demanding users. He said we need to know what users want to search, how they want their information presented, and what other tools they want us to integrate with, in order to really put the “wow” in our products.

On a side note, a really interesting talk was given by Google explaining their “Google Books Project”.  Google Books’ main goal is simple and extremely ambitious: Google wants to scan, OCR and make available online every book ever published, all 130 million by their estimate. More specifically Google wants to make it easier for people to find relevant books – specifically, books they wouldn’t find any other way  that are difficult to find, such as those that are out of print– while carefully respecting authors’ and publishers’ copyrights. Google wants to work with publishers and libraries to create a comprehensive, searchable, virtual collection of all books in all languages that helps users discover new books and helps publishers discover new readers.

If you want to know more about the face-off between the Discovery Service providers, look for Abe Lederman’s post late this week– I hear it will be quite the review.

If you would like more information about Deep Web Technologies’ federated search solutions click here.

In 2008, Thomson Reuters sold Dialog to ProQuest Information and Learning, a provider of information to researchers and libraries. As far as I can tell, there is very little press on the impact of the Dialog sale to Westlaw and its subscribers.

However, I’ve begun to notice an interesting development occurring for Deep Web Technologies, in that we have received an inordinate number of inquires and expressions of interest from the legal world over the past few months. Larger law firms and practices (especially those involving intellectual property and legal research), are beginning to take notice of federated search technology, and many in the legal world are beginning to see how federated search can provide a strategic advantage over mere access to Westlaw or similar organizations.

It makes me wonder whether there is a connection to the timing of this increased interest, with the loss of Dialog for Westlaw’s users.

Given that I am an intellectual property attorney, I can pick on intellectual property attorneys. We’re a diverse group — more diverse than appears at first blush. First, there are four main branches of intellectual property: Copyrights, Trademarks, Patents and Trade Secrets. There are specialty areas within each of them, such as trade dress under Trademarks and international under all branches. Let’s look at Patents for a minute. Two patent attorneys care about very different information if one patent attorney specializes in biomedical devices, and the other specializes in electronics. That’s an easy one to understand.

There can be strong differences, however, for patent attorneys in the same field. Consider two patent attorneys specializing in electronics, if one specializes in computer hardware and the other specializes in semiconductors. Interestingly, even two patent attorneys in same field of semiconductors could differ in their research needs if one specializes in patent drafting and the other specializes in litigation.

I could go on.

The point is, each and every attorney has very unique and differing research needs. No one information source has everything that every attorney needs. Not only that, many attorneys in large corporations, law firms or government offices have internal databases that also become a necessary part of their research.

Only federated search technology has the breadth to serve the particular needs of every attorney, because federated search conducts searches against all sources an attorney feels is important to their careers: Internal sources, subscriber-based sources (i.e. Westlaw) and favorite — subject matter specific — sources (i.e. IEEE, Wall Street Journal, etc).

In today’s world, where attorneys are pressured to keep fees low, yet expected to be on top of their game (both legally and in their respective subject matter), simple, affordable and comprehensive access to information is critical to success.

If you’re a Westlaw subscriber, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the loss of the Dialog database.