LexisNexis is a serious player who means business

New platform enhancements mean the online search pioneer is still on top of its game, says Davey Winder

LexisNexis provides access to a total of around 34,000 information sources globally, which include 12,000 regional, national and global newspapers, 80 suppliers of global corporate financial information, MarkIntel market research data and key biographical titles. Specific English sources include the likes of Computing, Financial Times, New Scientist, Economist, Guardian, Telegraph, Times, Observer, News of theWorld and even IWR.

In all the service provides access to more than 6 billion documents, making it a vastly larger source of trusted information than the world wide web. Indeed, LexisNexis has long claimed to be the world's largest collection of 'public records, unpublished opinions, forms, legal, news, and business information.' But with Google increasingly branching out into trusted source searching, on either a no fee or low fee basis, can the big boys of information retrieval continue to offer real value?

That's a difficult question to answer, not least because the pricing structure is veiled in secrecy. There is a huge range of pricing plan options that are customised on a per client basis to suit every customer base from diverse global organisations right down to individual users. However, in essence you can think of there being three main plans: flat fee, pay as you go and custom.

Pay as you go provides the cheapest entry route, starting from £50 per month, but for custom plans with bespoke integrated requirements and consulting, analytics and taxonomy services, for example, then the sky really is the limit.

Where LexisNexis differ from most in this field is that the cost is calculated upon a pay per search and not document viewed basis. So it is possible to collect as much data as required within a search and view several documents for a flat fee. A 'multiplying' option also enables customers to access up to three times their flat rate fee content value for no extra charge so someone paying £1,000 per month can access £3,000 worth of content. Trial subscriptions are available upon request to ensure you get the right service for your requirements and without any financial outlay.

So what do you get for your money? Well a customer help desk is available to provide ongoing support by telephone or email, but with the straightforward user interface (which is also compliant with DDA accessibility requirements), well written user guide and online tutorials it is doubtful that you will need much in the way of such help.

Although the search syntax can take a little getting used to it has to be said. Not that it is illogical or confusing, just different to the kind of thing the Google generation will be used to. It's possible to search for keywords within particular parts of a document by specifying a headline or lead paragraph 'article:hlead (keyword)' or within the company indexing for a company 'name:company (British Airways)' or articles over a certain length 'words:length (>1000)' for example.

To get the best from LexisNexis it is vital to understand this approach and learn the various commands that enable singular and plural form searching, finding words that appear a defined number of times within a document, or to retrieve words where only the first letter is capitalised. Oh, and we haven't even mentioned the use of connectors yet, such asw/n to link search words and phrases to create concepts without specifying word order. So cabbage w/5 soup will find those keywords within five words or less of each other for example. It all takes time, but it isn't rocket science, and the reward is a highly powerful and focussed search process.

The new LexisNexis platform enhancements include the ability to provide hits in context with display options for result enabling each document to be displayed individually with search terms highlighted and surrounded by a window of some 25 words. Then there is the 'My Research' section which provides easy access to your recent searches, recently viewed documents and saved searches. Interesting retrieval options seem to work well, such as the ability to retrieve the first 1,000 most relevant articles if your search finds more than 3,000 results for example. And results classification has improved, bringing with it the grouping of search results by source type, source name or language. As should the ability to easily find more focussed results by using the topics indexed within a document retrieved from an initial search.

On the corporate search side of the fence, LexisNexis provides company hierarchies up to six levels that enable the easy viewing of parent, subsidiary and company relationships. Throw in the additional option of accessing share prices, histories and charts plus the link to a Company Dossier service with snapshot, full and custom company information reports and the full depth of discovery starts to emerge. But that's not all, thanks to the recent purchase of analytics firm Datops, LexisNexis will also shortly offer a bolt-on 'Data Analytics' capability to integrate searches with the ability to spot emerging market trends, anticipate financial portfolio risks and maximise research and development effectiveness.

The ability to pull information from such a huge pool of trusted sources, and have it delivered on demand or sent to virtually any device as required, makes LexisNexis a serious tool for anyone with a need for a serious information strategy. When the company started way back in 1973 it was a pioneer in the field of search and all but created the online information market. That landscape has changed dramatically, but LexisNexis remains ensconced at heart.

USABILITY

SITE DESIGN

INFORMATION DEPTH