How would you use it?

[hassen1]

In the beginnings of the web, nobody really had a clue about what they were hoping to find. If they entered a query into a search engine, they would have to traipse through every website that the SEs gave them, until, at last, they found what they were looking for. Not because the SEs were giving them poor information - without the SEs, they would actually have had to surf - but because people weren’t familiar with websites well enough to know which sites were good, and which were idiotic.

Today it’s the opposite. Studies show that now, people are far more set in their ways in terms of the sites they like - and so a search engine search would far more likely be a way to locate a specific page on a website, a URL for a site they’ve already been to but whose address they’ve forgotten. Even if they’re looking for something more generalized, they often aren’t looking for sites they don’t know about; they’re looking for relevant pages on the sites that they already know.

One example. Today, a searcher looking for “size 10 womens shoes” might really be looking for the quickest way to the relevant results on Zappos, Shoes.com, Amazon, or maybe a clothing store like JCrew.com and the like. Even if www.best-web-shoes.com has similar search engine ranking to those other sites (and even if, in actuality, it’s a perfectly decent online shoe store), the searcher won’t be as excited about best-web-shoes.com as she will about Zappos. Why? Because she was looking for the Zappos, Shoes.com, Amazon etc. that she already knew.

And everything can get more complicated when you get to research. Because a bulk of the task of research - even offline research - is figuring out what, of all the information you have in front of you, is right and what isn’t. And what makes research even more complicated than, say, shoe shopping is that you tend to know what shoes you’d like (even if you haven’t found them yet), but you’re doing research precisely because you don’t know what it is you’re trying to find. So it’s that much harder to weed out what’s helping you from what’s leading you in the wrong direction.

That’s true of all research. On Internet research, when you’re dealing with millions of people telling you millions of different things, determining what’s true and what isn’t becomes a million times more complicated.

Enter Search Subscriptions. Each of the publications that it searches is a respected name in its field. And, as the name Search Subscriptions might imply, each of them are subscription publications. That means that most of the people using the Search Subscriptions service will already have subscriptions to one or all of the publications that they’re reviewing - in other words, they’ve already significantly pre-screened the sites that they want to search for.