I better watch out, or I'll draw fire from Clay Shirky soon. But much of the debate over the semantic web clears my head by quite a distance – I'm more interested in what works and why. I just got off the phone with the GlobalSpec team -Jeffrey Killeen,…

I better watch out, or I’ll draw fire from
Clay Shirky soon. But much of the debate over the semantic web clears my head by quite a distance – I’m more interested in what works and why. I just got off the phone with the GlobalSpec team -Jeffrey Killeen, Chairman & CEO, and John Schneiter, President. It seems to me that
GlobalSpec is one of those innovations in search that works – at least for its intended audience – by adding context, organization, and tagging to a limited dataset. Sounds semantic to me.
GlobalSpec is a domain specific (or vertical) search engine. It got its start eight years ago as a classic IT play – take all the catalog-based information about engineering parts – sensors, transducers, etc. – and roll it into a huge, cross-referenced database, which you then distribute over the web. Make money by connecting customers to parts suppliers. Simple.
Over the years GlobalSpec has evolved into a robust community of a million or so engineering types who use it to find and spec parts. That alone is pretty cool (I mean, a million engineers!). But the coolest stuff was just launched: They call it “The Engineering Web” and it’s a domain-specific crawl of the web for engineering information. And not only have they crawled the web (about 100K engineering related sites, so far), they’ve also surfaced invisible web databases not found in mainstream search engines – patent and standards sites, for example, which are walled off by registration and business considerations. Anyone can use the service – it’s not limited to registered users. In essence, GlobalSpec has built a portal that drives traffic and intent through their original database business, in the process building an intelligent island of engineering information that lives in the public sphere. Of course this means they can add AdWord-like functionality, which of course they are working on.
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