Your Measurement Tool Box

Web Clipping Services Face Off:

Cyberalert vs. Northern Light

by Lindsey Wyckoff

The speed and ease of the Internet have become fertilizer for news and gossip alike. Keeping abreast of the vast amount of information available is an important factor in public relations today. Monitoring what is said about your company or brand is a fundamental way to measure your image and results. With the wealth of information in cyberspace ever increasing, searching out a single phrase or name may seem like a daunting task. Web clipping services are a way to track the information you choose without investing countless hours of research. With a myriad of options in all price ranges, we chose two leading competitors to present head to head.

Cyberalert covers 5,400 web publications, 63,000 usenet groups and numerous public search engines in an effort to bring up-to-date "clips" from obscure chat rooms as well as more well-known online newspapers and journals. Automated technology allows them to monitor and deliver clips on a daily basis. An email is sent each day containing clips recovered the previous day. The clips are triple-filtered to screen those that are irrelevant. Cyberalert also allows the user to create a complex Boolean search string with multiple keywords and exclusions. This feature provides for a more customized search than available with other clipping services. Another recent addition is the ability to choose which sites you want monitored, rather than getting lost in their rather large universe.

The "cached text" feature seems to be a rare offering in the web-clipping world. Cyberalert saves the text from each URL as it is discovered, preventing problems which arise from dead URLs. Even when a URL no longer exists, the original text is still available to the user. There is a personal database of all your clips available to you at all times. The services of Cyberalert come at a price, albeit a small one compared to other similar services (which can run as high as $14,995 per month). There is a $395 per search monthly fee and a set-up fee of $125 per search. Changes in the search string result in a $50 charge. Alas, the world is not perfect; even with Cyberalert's impressive automated software, there are still misses and repeat clips to contend with. However, one user we interviewed pointed out that Cyberalert is quick to update their databases when contacted with any such problem.

If $395 is not in your budget, Search Alerts is a low cost alternative offered by Northern Light. The account is free, but there is a fee to view many of the "clips" which come from the Northern Light Special Collection. It ranges from $1-$4 per item. The Northern Light technology offers you five different search methods to choose from: Simple Search, Power Search, Business Search, Investext, and Search News. All of the search methods are restricted to items in the Northern Light database; they do not use the additional public search engines that Cyberalert does. With over 7,100 online publications as well as over 350 million web pages, the scope is still quite vast.

Any basic search performed on the Norhtern Light engine may be saved and set to look for clips. This is an interesting feature, however going through a Search Alerts account yields more accurate and timely results. Although the user has the option to limit where the keyword is found (document title only, for example), you do not have the ability to do a Boolean search, which detracts somewhat from the integrity of the data.

When the database is updated with more articles or websites that contain your keywords, an email is sent notifying you. The email includes a hot link URL that leads to the updated clips. Search Alerts will send email notifications up to three times a day with new information.

Unfortunately, great speed of delivery does not guarantee great results. The new clips delivered may be recent only to the Northern Light database, but not to the rest of the world. An acquisition by divine, inc. in January may bring Northern Light Search Alerts up to speed in the future. For now there remain two major user complaints: frequency of misses and the inability to create a pinpointed boolean-type search string. Although their database is large, monitoring sources outside the Northern Light universe would make the service much more accurate.

Conclusions: See our Suitability Meter up on the right for general recommendations. As with everything, accuracy comes with a price. If you are a corporate marketer looking to monitor the performance or reputation of your product, CEO, competition or brand name, then Cyberalert is the tool for you. Northern Light offers a wide array of services, web clipping being one of the many. For those looking at a fast approaching thesis, we recommend Search Alerts as a potentially free and relatively easy way to simplify the research process.

Sources:

http://www.cyberalert.com

http://www.northernlight.com

http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday
“Search engines with Autopilot”

http://websearch.about.com
“A News Clipping Service of Your Own”

http://www.wired.com/news
“Fire Insurance for the Internet”

http://www.infotoday.com
“Web Monitoring and Clipping Services Round-Up”
“divine, inc. acquires Northern Light Technology”