Okay, a search engine or business strategy has to be really intriguing or really powerful to get me out of bed in the middle of the night to write about it as I am doing right now with DeepDyve. DeepDyve delivers. I am also a sucker for catchy slogans, like DeepDyve’s, “search for research.” DeepDyve not only offers some pretty impressive technology, it is also developing just out and out brilliant marketing strategies that create win-wins for publishers, authors and those of us like medical librarians and other information professionals and academics who make our livings from and live for the fun of the fastest possible acquisition and provision to patrons, clients and peers of the best data possible.

Please, please take notice scientific and technical publishers. There is a vast potential and in many cases deep-pocketed audience for your superb material and DeepDyve can help you get it to us. In the age of Twitter, where viral marketing and microcontent rules DeepDyve is the best of friend of multiple actors. I wish I were as smart as these boys and as someone who loves finding just the right abstract of just that key article to send to a patron and alert him or her to the existence of a journal neither of us had heard of before, I am fondly hoping that publishers will pounce on the marketing savvy of DeepDyve to spread the news of their treasure troves of scholarly material that is lamentably under-disseminated at this point.

Got me on all that? It is hard to write about all of this succinctly and pithily because there is so much to discuss here given the fact that I want to discuss DeepDyve both as a search engine and as an innovator in information discovery and marketing.

Let’s start with the search engine aspects. In a word, superb. The interface is attractive and sleek. Pretty even. (Okay, men — it is okay that a search engine is pretty — if I am going to spend hour after hour in a search environment, I want it to be beautiful. DeepDyve and I are going to get to know each other well and I like the looks of it both aesthetically and technologically.)

And there are gobs of powerful features. I have just been trying them out with my usual favored search term, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Loved the excellent results I could call up with “More Like This” and loved being able to highlight certain phrases and drill down incredibly quickly and with dream-like effortlessness.

I also like the fact that on the side of the search page was a link to General Feedback Forum where, with admirable forbearance and transparency, DeepDyve displays reactions that are a bit on the grumpy side and enables users to make and vote on suggestions. I voted for the suggestions, “allow the user to sort responses by chronology” and “give more possibilities in the advanced filters.” These are shown to be under review and I would think, given the obvious ability of the people who work for DeepDyve,  that these features will be trotted out in coming months.

And as someone who spends huge amounts of time in the land of blogs and Web sites I would strongly urge anyone who wants visitors to stick around and explore their content in depth, from those who manage large corporate Web sites to independent but productive bloggers, look into DeepDyve’s Application Programming Interfaces (API) like the More Like This Document API and the Search API. Boy, if those technologies were universally adopted what a great world it would be.

For instance, I love the Life Scientists Room of FriendFeed. I learn a lot from bloggers like Chris Pirillo http://chris.pirillo.com but searching his site is a royal pain. And that is a shame given that nearly everything he writes is well worth reading and learning from if only we could search and find and zero in at his blog to find what we want and at FriendFeed ditto.

I just popped over to Twitter and how I wish that next right next to each fascinating item that so many of the people follow on it post I could search in Twitter with DeepDyve’s More Like This tool. That would be very heaven. Twitter execs, pretty please! It would astronomically increase the value of Twitter for users and certainly would endear it to bloggers by upping their traffic and encourage then to plunk Follow Me on Twitter buttons on their homepages. If I had a blog with loads of content I wanted to render findable, I would call DeepDyve immediately. And no I don’t work for DeepDyve. I just happen to be obsessed with information and its dissemination and these guys rule.

And apropos of information dissemination, let us know discuss how DeepDyve’s foray into working with sci/tech and health science publishers would benefit multiple players simultaneously. I had a nice chat with DeepDyve’s CEO William Park a few weeks ago and he walked me through the many strategies and techniques DeepDyve has developed to enable publishers to alert potential buyers of their content of the very existence of that content.

Helloooo Elsevier, Springer, Sage and Wiley—want to reach far greater audiences than you have dreamt of? There is a vast, educated, affluent reading public that lies untapped that never even deals with the librarians that you currently cater to–think of the increasing numbers of proactive, empowered patients we are seeing with the rise of online communities such as Patients Like Me.

DeepDyve has come up with two incredibly useful concepts and tools: Landing Pages and a Highlight Widget. Here I will simply quote from DeepDyve’s Web site so that you can all read for yourselves what these are and how they work.

First, the Landing Pages,

“Landing Pages are clusters or “mash-ups” of related articles and complementary bibliographical materials that, once they are deployed on a site map, help Google and other search engines discover additional valuable content from across a publisher’s archives.

The pages are created dynamically from content in the DeepDyve index, using DeepDyve’s More Like This technology. The More Like This links are updated automatically as new content becomes available. For every document supplied by the publisher, DeepDyve creates a content-rich page containing links to other highly relevant articles within the archive, and deploys those pages using a site map that is optimized for crawling by Google and other search engines. DeepDyve will create and maintain the Landing Pages on its servers which will be accessed off the Publisher’s sub-domain such that the user experience will be consistent with the publisher’s own site.

Benefits:

* Bring “Deep Web” content — PDF’s, subscription-only archives, and database records — closer to the surface where search engines and Web users can find it.
* Create a content-rich cluster for every document in an archive, and in so doing, boost the visibility and revenue potential for the “long tail” of seldom-found documents.
* Effectively promote and sell content from across all publications in the collection.”

Okay, that is pretty persuasive to me. I love reading abstracts and often want to immediately forward them to researchers and clinicians that I think could benefit from them. But it is a headache to search in Elsevier’s ScienceDirect or at the sites of publishers like Springer and individual journal sites. I often have to copy and paste the link into my email program. Such hassles for users only hobble sci/tech publishers as they struggle to figure out how to survive in the age of Google. Many publishers are so concerned about losing control of their content that they render it so unfriendly to search engines that it might as well be invisible.

That’s so unwise and self-defeating. After all, if as a librarian or simply as a educated, power searcher (or just an educated person and not a power searcher at all but one that could simply by circulating news to my circle of acquaintances abstracts of interest generate interest in a journal) I could learn via DeepDyve itself in its role as a search engine of an abstract on interest or via other search engine that would waft me straight away to Landing Pages DeepDyve has designed for, say, Elsevier or Sage, and if at that Landing Page I could swiftly email the abstract of an article of interest I find there and do so with the many items I would find via the More Like This and DeepDyve’s Highlight Widget and better yet (think viral marketing!) if each abstract had a “Tweet this” button (and I would think DeepDyve could easily enough offer that feature on its Landing Pages), then many, many more people would learn about an article than is currently the case even though some a few publishers grudgingly offer some social bookmarking features such as Connotea and Delicious.

Here is a bit on the Highlight Widget from DeepDyve’s site:

Improve the user experience and increase the “stickiness” of your site by seamlessly integrating search into the browsing and reading experience. Enable users to discover new articles in real time and build awareness of the breadth and depth of your content.

I’m convinced.

For instance, here is a scenario. I am extremely interested in the subject of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. I just did a search in DeepDyve on that subject. I learned by doing so that there is an article in a journal I had never heard of, Human Molecular Genetics from Oxford University Press. Now there were some useful features on that page that are fairly standard these days such as, Email this article to a friend and Social BookMarking. Interestingly, although we see the tools:

Similar articles in this journal
Similar articles in ISI Web of Science
Similar articles in PubMed

We don’t see, Similar articles from Oxford University Press and you would think it would want to highlight stuff from its own publications.

Also, much of what should be free from a no-brainer marketing standpoint such as Alert me to new issues of the journal result in, “The page you wish to view is within the My Account area of the site.” And forget about a Twitter button. Thus, instead on my being able to alert via Twitter hundreds of people at a shot in seconds to the existence of article instead and the journal it appears in (and many of those people might become paying subscribers) I am allowed to email one person or hope that people will visit my bookmarks. This is all exceedingly clunky. What these publishers need are sleek, search-engine optimized DeepDyve Designed Landing Pages neatly outfitted with its search box and its widgets.

William Park said some very interesting things during our conversation such as, “Your highlight is your query.” Want to keep people on your site—enable them to highlight key phrases. And “Your search becomes your reading.” This is what I want to say to publishers, “If you want to engage users and render them into first readers and then paying subscribers, render your content firstly findable via DeepDyve’s search engine friendly Landing Pages and then, once you have attracted such visitors to your site, leverage DeepDyve’s site search tools to enable the idly curious visitor or one deeply hungry for what you are offering to become engaged readers and then enable them to alert their Twitter followings to what they have discovered at your site and to set up email alerts of saved searches at your site and table of contents alerts and, if possible, enable them within those emails to link out to Twitter and FriendFeed so as to alert their followers to your content.”

DeepDyve may have its work cut out for it in persuading the sci/tech publishers to plunge into the Web 2.0 waters. Indeed, the fact that the Open Access publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS) is embracing DeepDyve’s technologies may only frighten them and entrench them in their stodginess, as PLoS is regarded by the established publishers as the devil incarnate. But the very fact that PLoS is deploying DeepDyve’s technologies will enable PLoS to become even more of a threat to Elsevier, et al given that the easier material is to find and search, the more it is cited and the more an article is cited the more the journal and author so cited gain in credibility at and are cited again etc, while equally outstanding articles published by Elsevier and co. languish in obscurity because nobody knows about them save for the patrons of the dwindling number of libraries and the scholars that can afford subscriptions to them. If I were a commercial rival to PLoS, I would definitely talk to DeepDyve about Landing Pages. The more people who read abstracts, the more potential there is to increase subscription sales. After all, I can’t subscribe to a journal I have never heard of. The content of Elsevier and Springer is peerless. I just wish for their sakes that that they would loosen up enough to save themselves in an environment that is growing ever more hostile or at best indifferent to what can’t be found easily.

And the younger cohorts of scholars that the older publishing houses depend  on to produce the scholarly and scientific content that they publish and market will be easier to recruit and retain if those authors feel that their work is reaching  greater audiences than their older peers knew. Social networking is key to professional advancement these days and the sleeker the tools, the better. DeepDyve is their kind of thing.

Those interested in search and in the Deep Web and Web developers and bloggers and anyone who oversees Web sites (such as marketing professionals) should check out the tools at DeepDyve. It is a research tool that academics and librarians should take a look at. But its widgets could be advantageously deployed by anyone with a substantial amount of content on their site.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 at 2:12 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.