FirstRain’s new research engine is a breakthrough technology for solving the business search challenge.

Until now, search tools have failed to successfully address the problem of detecting and synthesizing business relationships from web data. We believe that only through these relationships can one produce truly relevant search results and analytics highlighting emerging trends and facts about businesses. Of course, search has made tremendous advancements in the last 5+ years. Structured search has blossomed in consumer-focused segments – for example movies, music and shopping – but not in the business segment. Business structured search has been notably un-served.

The heart of the challenge is that information about the structures driving industries and companies are: 1) continuously changing, 2) implicit and not explicit and 3) distributed through vastly heterogeneous sources. These business structures must be derived and then continuously maintained to be meaningful to informed professional users. FirstRain utilizes statistical methods and pattern-detection techniques to derive these business relationships from the corpus of news, commentary and in-depth industry sources on the web. The FirstRain system then generates complex business-structure models which drive its indexing, categorization and analytics engines. The result is a user experience based on relationships between companies, industry structures, people and business topics. The system delivers context-aware interactive search, plus the ability to detect emerging trends and synthesize patterns from business activity around the world.

The FirstRain research engine finds information that was simply impractical to find before. You can search, filter, cross reference and research companies, the markets they operate in, the business trends impacting them and the specific people moving between them. Users see a holistic view of a company’s ecosystem – its business lines, competitors, company-specific topics and industry-specific topics – and so can see information and trends from across the breadth of the web: from mainstream news, differentiated content and specialized content.

To view the video Demo just click here.

FirstRain is now used by sales, marketing, competitive intelligence, investor relations and investment professionals to find new opportunities and to efficiently stay current. For example, a sales team at a major blue chip bank uses FirstRain to generate cross-selling and up-selling ideas, as well as to gain competitive intelligence. The marketing department of a major pharmaceutical company monitors top suppliers and their markets and how it affects their pricing. Many investment managers use the research engine to generate new investment ideas and monitor their portfolio.

The proprietary technology that FirstRain has built provides you with easy access to organized and relevant content that is most important to your business. It’s an exciting, sleek new technology which sets the bar very high for business search.

Please note!

If you would like an opportunity to test it out, it is available to the first 100 people coming in from AltSearchEngines for a trial period.

Click here and use the referral code AltSearchEngines to try it for yourself.

Guest Author

Penny Herscher

Bay Area, CA and New York, United States

Second time CEO, currently of FirstRain, mother to 2 teenagers,
avid traveler, active non-profit board member on women and education issues.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Guest Authors, Innovations, News. 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.