We hate Google.
Google makes it easy to find answers to imponderable questions about life, the universe and everything.
But it’s hard to coax actionable business intelligence out of a search engine – and harder still to convince your CFO to pay for primary research (recruiting subjects, designing experiments, doing math, reporting conclusions) when she’s got Google sitting right there on her desk.
We love Google.
Google makes it possible to do some meaningful secondary research by spidering the web for arcane bits of data. Google also publishes some cool tools for analyzing trends and hot concepts. These are the inputs to analysis and recommendations – a betterfastercheaper approach that can often convince that CFO to cough up for the primary research.
Not just Google.
Secondary research makes sense of the data at hand – often that means mining company databases, or enriching customer records. Factotem has been known to write a few spiders, too.
- Competitive Intelligence spider: snarfs the location database of a chain retailer for input into GIS mapping and cluster analysis.
- Bibliometrics spider: snarfs scientific journal abstracts for input into computational linguistics.
- Buzz spider: snarfs blog entries and online community posts for input into attitudinal segmentation.
The truth is out there.
