‘Searching’ for an Audience

The launch of Search Medica, a highly tailored search engine for health care professionals, signifies the entrance of United Business Media’s (UBM) publishing division into a new way of connecting its audience with both content and advertisers.Partnering with Convera, a provider of search technologies, the London-based business-to-business multimedia company’s new search solution will allow articles from its international publications—including Psychiatric Times—to be searchable alongside content from recommended medical sites for free.Henry Elkington, CEO of CMPMedica, UBM’s medical publishing division, talks with Publishing Executive about the new opportunities custom search engines, such as Search Medica, could generate for his company and the industry. How will offering a Web search tool help retain readers and entice new readers for your print product?Henry Elkington: This is not about protecting the print product. This is about serving our audience with a tool that will be valuable and useful for them. And if there is any indirect benefit on the print title that’s great, but that’s not the objective of creating Search Medica.What was the driving factor behind its creation?Elkington: It really came out of primary research we did with our audience—understanding how they used print titles, how they used the Internet. … For many professionals, they make daily use of search engines. They use search engines designed for consumers, which are good, but imperfect tools for professionals. That created the idea of whether we could create a better search engine just focusing in on physicians.Do you consider this venture separate from the publishing aspect of the company’s business then?Elkington: I’d say this is absolutely central to what we do. If we look at our health care business, yes, we have some health care titles. That’s not really the core of the business. The core of the business is that we have an audience, physicians, we have a set of advertisers and we’re basically in the business of connecting the audience with the advertisers. … We happen to do that today with some print titles. We do it with some events. We may do it with some other forms of media. [Search Medica is just] another form of media that connects the same audience with the same set of advertisers.It is a new business line … but in a sense it is the same thing we’ve always been doing. I don’t view our business as a publishing business. … It’s a b-to-b media business, which is about connecting our audience with a set of advertisers.What was the benefit of having a third party develop this Web site instead of doing it in-house?Elkington: Indexing the Web is more complicated than it may have initially seemed. If you want a high-quality index of the Web, you need to put a lot of resources into it. It makes sense to use a shed index rather than building an index for ourselves as an individual publisher.How do you remain nonbiased with the searches?Elkington: Here I think we can borrow principals from the print world. Our print titles carry advertising … and that doesn’t interfere with the independence of the editorial content there. … That’s essentially the position we’re taking on Search Medica. We designed the natural search results to be the best possible results for our audience. We take advertising around it so we can offer a free service to end users. What were some of the challenges in launching this search solution?Elkington: The notion of building a search engine that 99 percent of the time was going to drive the audience to other people’s content and not our own content was counterintuitive for many people in the team. That took some getting over. Having done that, now the issue is it’s a novel solution for advertisers. We’re now finding that we do need to educate them to the service. I think when we do that, they do get it. How does this improve upon what is possible with a Google or Yahoo search?Elkington: We’re trying to improve the experience for a very specific audience. … What your family physician is likely to say when he uses Google is, “I can find the things I’m looking for, but I have to wade through things that are not relevant. … It takes me too long.”We’re only searching on the bit of the Web that is relevant for U.S. family physicians. Therefore we get more quickly to the hits [the family physician] is really looking for. You’ll just find the stuff that you would have found anyway, but you’ll find it a little more quickly, because there won’t be so much rubbish.We know the types of things physicians typically search for. … We make some suggested links on the left-hand side of the page, which are designed to be in an architecture that doctors will recognize. That, again, will help them get to the more specific content.We are getting access to some password-protected content, which Google won’t index. We’re indexing the content. We will only provide it to you if you can provide the password. PE

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‘Searching’ for an Audience

Peter Beisser

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Peter Beisser