Biznar Open for Business (Search)

Federated search shop Deep Web Technologies recently released its latest search portal: Biznar. The site is being promoted as a “one-stop business research portal,” useful to patrons, reference librarians, and managers of special business-related collections alike.

Biznar retrieves content ranging across business research, news articles, government information, and blog posts, all selected from “vetted research sources, chosen for their outstanding contributions to business research,” according to the site, including resources such as the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, The Motley Fool, and Resource Shelf.

The new service builds off the success of Deep Web's previous federated search endeavors including scitopia.org, WorldwideScience.org, and science.gov. Like these other sites, Biznar similarly features Deep Web's Explorit Research Accelerator to pull in materials from external resources in real time, displaying them all in a common results list, deduped and reranked according to their new contextual relevancy.

Serials Solutions, another company trafficking in search connectors, has recently announced its new “Connection Development Framework” for both its 360 Search and WebFeat federated search products. The company says the platform will help developers “create better, faster and higher quality connections” to the wide array of databases and digital resources that librarians seek to make accessible.

In addition, for keeping track of usage statistics and generating reports on resource usage in federated search and elsewhere, Serials Solutions has announced a new “Data Retrieval Service” for 360 Counter, its COUNTER-compliant e-resource assessment tool. The Data Retrieval Service aims to take care of collecting information from licensed electronic resources, normalizing and correcting vendor data for use in 360 Counter's assessment tools such as cost-per-click and cost-per-use reports.