News publishing industry search engine launches

The objective of the vertical orientation of www.ifrasearch.com is to ensure that results generated by IFRA Search offer quality instead of quantity, quickly and precisely – the result of a two-year development period based on more than 40 years of IFRA know-how in the news publishing industry.

“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 integrate all IFRA Search functions and access all databases via their own website or intranet. Information about this is available at 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 IFRA's own databases, as well as those of its cooperation partners;
  
• the “Web” search block contains information from the media 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 level of quality of the search engine, continually evaluating potential sources and adding 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 such 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.

Queries relating IFRA Search partnership and sponsoring, as well as content, suggestions and reports of experience with the IFRA search engine, may be emailed to .

• IFRA (www.ifra.com) is a worldwide research and service organisation for the news publishing industry, headquartered in Darmstadt, Germany. Since 1961 it has acted as a platform for decision-makers from the newspaper industry. IFRA offers its services primarily to its more than 3100 members in nearly 80 countries.