GraphicBrain.com, the industry search engine, was born out of frustration, frustration that it was virtually impossible to access the right information in an efficient way, especially on the Internet. Therefor the people from VIGC, the Flemish Innovation Centre for Graphic Communication (Belgium), created their own tool: GraphicBrain.com, a powerful tool that they opened up to everybody. "VIGC is a small organisation and our mission is to follow up on new technologies in the graphic arts, printing and publishing industry to help people implement these new technologies. But keeping up with the vast amounts of information coming to our desks every day, and more: retrieving the right information when we needed it, used to be a problem.", explains Eddy Hagen, manager GraphicBrain.com. Frustration leads to user-focused search engine "Everybody who searches the Internet from time to time knows how difficult this can be: lots of irrelevant results, pages that aren’t online anymore, the difficulty to really focus your search. For each of our frustrations we’ve found a solution, resulting into a very powerfull tool, called GraphicBrain.com. Which makes it the best, the most user-focused search engine out there.", says Hagen. The examples are numerous: e.g. looking for ‘trapping’ in any major search engine, will give about 600 000 results, but most of them are not relevant to the graphic arts industry. Having a very clear focus – the technology and products used in the graphic arts, printing and publishing industry – eliminates these irrelevant results. But even then, a query can give completely different kinds of results. E.g. ‘wavelet compression’, the technology behind JPEG2000, will show products using this technology, but also the science behind it, which is only interesting for a researcher. To avoid this mixture, GraphicBrain.com has devided all the information our there into different, very distinct information types, e.g. product information, research sites, magazines, discussion groups, white papers, … Forget Google! The tools and technology behind GraphicBrain.com make it a much more powerful search engine than Google, AltaVista, Lycos or any other search engine. All of these tools developped to fit VIGC’s needs are open for GraphicBrain.com users: - Powerful, self learning search technology: even complex queries like ‘comparing the cost of flexo and gravure’ or ‘a technical guide on the use of color management in Adobe InDesign’ are no problem - Clear focus: technology and products used in the graphic arts, printing and publishing industry. No printers or resellers. - Automatic hyperlinking: shows similar documents when a result is opened - Real summaries, up to 10 sentences long, not just a collection of incoherent words - Cached text, when documents are (temporarily) not on-line - Sorting the results by website, via the Search ‘n Sort! - Focussing search to specific kinds of information (e.g. magazines) - Personal assistant: intelligence agents, e-mail alerting, virtual networking 1 year experience: more tools, more performance, and more information GraphicBrain.com launched it service in Belgium one year ago. Since then GraphicBrain.com gained a lot of experience. Additional tools were added and changes to the configuration were made. "The first 5 or 6 months we were experiencing performance problems. But with the help of our technology partners, MediaMine and Autonomy, we’ve made some changes. Performance isn’t an issue anymore: the results will be loaded after about 2 seconds. Loading the page can take some time, but this is only limited by the bandwidth of the user.", explains Hagen. The amount of information has grown exponentially. At this moment GraphicBrain.com is indexing over 3 500 websites related to the industry, accounting for nearly 3 million documents. "Every time we encounter a new website that seems interesting to us, we add it to our ‘brain’. So everybody benefits from the work we do at VIGC.", says Hagen. Among those 3 500 websites, there are more than 30 on-line magazines with more than 40 000 articles. And GraphicBrain.com has also indexed over 275 000 messages from discussion groups. Gigantic ROI A large part of GraphicBrain.com is for free: everybody can query the product information. Launching a query in the other information types (e.g. magazines, discussion groups, white papers, …), will show the results list, but anonymous users won’t be able to click through to the documents. Registration is almost for free, GraphicBrain.com charges a minor 25 Euro (about 23 US $) per user per year. "If you are really looking for information, GraphicBrain.com is the solution. And the small registration fee has a gigantic ROI. Just count the hours per year that you are looking without finding, or trying to solve a problem that has already been discussed zillions of times on the net…", concludes Hagen. GraphicBrain.com can be found at the following address: www.GraphicBrain.com.