Newspaper & Mailroom
IFRA Search is the vertical search engine for the news publishing industry
Monday 03. March 2008 - www.ifrasearch.com: search and find in the newspaper world
On 28th February, IFRA Search, the search engine for the news publishing industry, officially goes online. With www.ifrasearch.com, IFRA is introducing the first professional research tool for specialised searching on to the market: by using IFRA Search, persons working in the media industry will find all information relevant to the news publishing industry drawn from IFRAs own, partners and other high-quality sources.
Its vertical orientation ensures that the hits generated by IFRA Search offer quality instead of quantity – the result of a two-year development period based on more than 40 years of IFRA know-how in the news publishing industry. Thus the IFRA search engine offers the possibility to find important contents quickly and precisely.
“There is an enormous volume of knowledge concerning the news publishing industry spread throughout the world. An important objective of IFRA Search is to index as much of this material as possible”, says IFRA CEO Reiner Mittelbach. “Even if access to the material is limited (password protected), its inclusion in IFRA Search contributes to heightening general awareness of the wealth of research projects, studies, publications and reports that exists on topics that are of decisive interest for the industry.”
“IFRA Search is an open service for the news publishing industry. It is available to everyone in the Internet and can be embedded in every website or intranet”, says Dr. Amrei Wiederin, IFRA Search development manager. With a simple HTML or JavaScript coding, users can seamlessly integrate all IFRA Search functions and access all databases via their own website or intranet. All necessary information about this is available under www.ifra.com/ifrasearch.
The IFRA search engine at present offers newspaper-related results in three research areas:
– The “IFRA & Partners” search block permits access to IFRAs own databases as well as those of its cooperation partners;
– the “Web” search block contains information from the manufacturing industry as well as from other sources;
– “News” the search block is based mainly on up-to-the-minute sources (RSS feeds and websites).
The search query corresponds to those of the regular search engines, with indication of the language area, search with operands, etc. Formal source filters in the search areas concerned enhance the hit quality. Behind each displayed document there is also a link that opens a pop-up window with the summary of the document concerned.
An IFRA team of experts constantly monitors the high level of quality of the search engine, continually evaluates potential sources and adds to them if necessary.
The IFRA Search partners listed on the right margin of the results page are organisations or companies with especially important database stocks and with which specific agreements were reached to support this initiative. The German Newspaper Publishers Association (BDZV) is the first IFRA Search partner.
A sponsorship of IFRA Search offers companies the opportunity to attract greater attention by a specialised audience, as everyone who uses IFRA Search is interested in the news publishing industry. Companies wishing to act as sponsor of the IFRA search engine are invited to contact IFRA.