Not surprisingly, this year most of the large information providers have come over all internetty. But why would anyone want to bother with the traditional and expensive database services, when by November 15 the Lycos World-Wide Web indexer had found 11,646,653 documents?

Here's why. I thought I'd seen somewhere that IBM was investing in Lycos. So I asked Lycos. Nothing relevant in the first 20 "hits". What does this mean? Was there a Web page that's now been removed? I must have spent about an hour hunting around and trying different search-terms.

At least tonight the internet is working. A couple of weeks ago something went badly wrong with some routers in the States and Lycos was practically unreachable from here. (Word has it that the routers were spending so much time updating their address tables to add new sites, that they didn't have time to route any actual data anywhere. Internet implosion imminent: film at 11.)

Then, on the off-chance, I tried searching that grandparent of all rumour-mills, Usenet news. But the intriguing Dejanews service showed no mentions of "lycos". It must have been broken, because it also showed no messages containing either "cancel" or "scientology". Enough. Time to hit the hard stuff. Ask Reuters' TextLine, through the FT Profile database gateway, to show me all articles mentioning
"lycos" AND ("buy" OR "cash" OR "invest*").

No hits. Try the same search on all the UK broadsheet newspapers. One article. Get it. Whoops, it's an oenophile writing about looking for wine to buy on the net. Cost so far: £4.82, using Poptel's FIND gateway to Profile, which means I was only briefly actually connected to that 60p-a-minute service and I didn't have to stump up hundreds of pounds for a Profile password. Time: about five minutes.

When FT Profile, or Dialog or DataStar tell you that an article or data record isn't there, it really isn't, and hasn't been since the beginning of recorded time (which in this world is March 1980 in the US, and 1986 in the UK). If an article has been retracted, they tell you -- and you have to go to the library to read the alleged conents.

These services are the Outernet: solid, reliable, trustworthy, and fiendishly expensive. In the information society they're the bank managers to the internet's party animals.

They, like the internet, have their quirks. Profile's most irritating is to insist that it can't display the one matching headline when you asked for up to the latest 20, because 1 up to 1 is "not an ascending sequence". (Is there a doctor of number theory in the house?) They're not nice to look at -- photographers and Mac users of my acquaintance hate them.

And to use their full power you need a grasp of logical AND and OR; but at least they will allow you to search for articles containing precisely ("this" OR "that") AND "the other". Easy interfaces are very frustrating when you know where you want the parentheses.

As soon as e-money condenses from vapourware into reality, someone's bound to put together gateways between the Inter- and the Outernet. But who?

The Knight-Ridder newspaper group, owner of Dialog and DataStar, has extensive Web pages. These provide useful descriptions of the content of hundreds of separate databases. But if you follow the link to access a database host, you're dumped unceremoniously at an "ENTER YOUR USERID" prompt. That'll be £many, please... there doesn't seem to be any pricing information online. The FT Profile site is sketchy by comparison.

Where mortals can get hold of Outernet information is where billing systems are already in place -- primarily Compuserve. There, it's possible to order a $50 company report and not feel the pain until the credit card bill arrives.

Stock market information on Compuserve has been getting cheaper, in an expanding market driven by the US penchant for risking one's own pension fund on having better investment nous than Wall Street. You pay much more to get quotes minutes earlier: a feed delayed by 30 minutes is half the price of one delayed by 15, and real-time data will set you back several thousand a year.

Costs, or rather charges, are the heart of the matter. The owners of database companies are cagey about their profitability. And when you ask about subscription costs, they're still in classic Outernet "we'll send a rep round to discuss a deal" mode. This hasn't stopped them taking a lot of revenue. This year's European Union Green Paper on copyright estimates the size of the world on-line information market at 8700 million ECU (£7000 million) -- in 1992, when the internet was still a nerd thing. Of that, 81% was for broking, credit and financial data.

These information providers have clearly based their pricing on what the market will bear -- and, so, far, the market has been perceived as City analysts (and hard-pressed journalists).

How much will you pay not to go to the British Newspaper Library at Colindale? Spending £25 in five minutes seems almost reasonable, when you compare it to the time it takes to get to a library and leaf through sheets of crumbling cellulose, let alone the headache you get from a microfilm reader. But it's not the dawn of a new age of unlimited information for all.

Neither, in fact, is the Web. As it stands, it's useless as an archive, because no version control on documents is enforced. There is a big question over whether it's maintainable: at what point in its growth do WebMasters spend 168 hours a week updating links?

If people in general are going to have access to accurate information online, someone needs to invest in very powerful hardware, maintain a rigorous archive, and sell the data cheaply to millions rather than thousands of people. And when database provision comes out of the shadows of obscure corners of the financial information market, the providers will have to re-think how they pay for the content.

Oh, and who does own Lycos? It won't tell you. I asked Profile to ask 90 to 100 US newspapers, and the Dow Jones newswire reported (for a further £7) that it's an outfit called CMG Information Services. CMG has a Web page, which reveals that it's been in the direct-marketing mailing-list business for 28 years, but not who owns it (that'd be $20-ish). An interesting tie- up, though... must remember to give the wrong postcode if Lycos ever asks me to register.

home

Written:
26 November 1995

An edited and doubtless thus improved version of this article appeared in the Guardian OnLine section.

This version is © copyright 1996 Mike Holderness; moral rights are asserted.

The links (as they were then)

Lycos is now here; please update your links...

Dejanews

FIND is available only to Poptel subscribers

Knight-Ridder Web pages

FT Profile

CMG's page