research search engines

Filed in archive on July 9, 2003

An interesting business model in form of a company called Alacritude has been funded in the last days with an impressing amount of USD 4.3 mio. In general I'm not a fan of subscription models or any paid content. To sell content is a very tricky business, although content itself becomes undoubtedly increasingly important.

Alacritude claims

"... the Internet lacks a tool that allows individual researchers to winnow through the results from a variety of sources, capture only the most relevant information, and organize the information by packaging it to suit personal needs (integrate it into a report, for example). "

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While it is true, it's difficult to make users pay for such a service. Alacritude has taken over two portals (elibraryand encyclopedia.com) from Tucows last year.

Google has built up a grass root approach to ease up research with Google Answers. You pay for knowledge as a service, only if you find what you are looking for, not for the content itself. So I'm curious to see, how Alacritude revenues will develop.