(13 January 2003) GraphicBrain.com, the industry search engine, has added a new tool to its service. It’s posting a daily updated overview of recently published news articles on its site. The overview contains links to articles on dedicated news sites. GraphicBrain.com visits over 30 news sites on a daily basis, all dedicated to the industry. The overview is freely accessible to all users. “This is of course a major improvement of our service”, says Eddy Hagen, manager GraphicBrain.com. Until recently, most of the information in GraphicBrain.com came from vendor websites and from on-line magazines. The GraphicBrain.com ‘web spiders’ visit vendor sites on a monthly basis and on-line magazine on a weekly basis. So it could take some time before information on new products was retrievable via the GraphicBrain.com search engine. With the addition of this ‘news’ section, new information is added to its database every day. “We don’t create this content ourselves”, explains Hagen. “So we’re absolutely not competing with these news resources. We are only giving an – automatically generated - summary and providing a link to the articles they are publishing on their website. Doing so, we make their content retrievable via our dedicated search engine. So it’s a win-win situation for all: news sites will get more exposure, our users will have access to more information.” Certainly for people who are looking for very specific information, this is good news. Instead of having to consult multiple sites every day, they only need to query the GraphicBrain.com database to know which news resource published something interesting. The combination with the ‘agents’ that are available to registered users is also very powerful. Registered users can set up agents that will follow up their favorite topics and every day they can receive an e-mail with an overview of the news published on these topics. Improved interface “We have also made some changes to the interface, especially to the ‘advanced search’ section.”, adds Hagen. “From the feedback we got, we had to conclude that many users don’t use the search functionalities the way they are intended to. Which of course leads to results that aren’t always the best possible. E.g. many people query all the different ‘information types’ we distinguish at once. Although the reason why we created these distinct information types was the ability to query them separately: the information from a vendor site is not the same as information from a magazine or a discussion forum. If you query the different information types one at a time, you will get much better results.” The updated search screen immediately shows some suggestions regarding the use and also provides direct links to more help information. “GraphicBrain.com was designed by people that are searching for information on a daily basis. Many features were added to overcome the problems all search engines face. It can take some time to get used to, but when used in the proper way, GraphicBrain.com outperforms them all.”, concludes Hagen. GraphicBrain.com is a dedicated search engine for the graphic arts, printing and publishing industry. Its focus is on the technology and products used in this industry. Next to vendor websites, also magazines, news resources, discussion groups and even research sites are indexed on a regular basis. The search engine is based on ‘concept matching’ and therefore it can handle complex queries. Also users can focus their search to a distinct type of information. GraphicBrain.com is a service provided by VIGC, the Flemish Innovation Centre for Graphic Communication. For more information, please contact Eddy Hagen, manager GraphicBrain.com, e-mail: [email protected]