Better search for World Fishing

It has initially been rolled out across the company’s seven main business-to-business magazine and exhibition brand sites. To achieve this, Mercator has chosen to partner with Funnelback UK and deploy its world-leading search engine technology.

Andrew Webster, managing director of Mercator commented, “Today, businesses are faced with an avalanche of information available for decision making. The real problem for them is finding and picking out the items that are actually useful and relevant. And the problem of information overload is only going to escalate at an ever increasing rate”.

Mercator Media publishes a range of market leading niche business magazines, online services and directories used by readers around the world in the marine and logistics sectors. It also produces a number of associated exhibitions and conferences such as the Icelandic Fisheries Exhibition. These services help businesses keep up-to-date, solve problems, research products and services, and locate specialist suppliers. But the number of items of information that Mercator publishes on its websites, together with the possibilities for adding yet more data from the Web, makes it an ever more complicated task. The solution to make it easy for users to access this enormous resource was for Mercator to provide a more sophisticated search technology.

Mercator Search will deliver faster, more accurate results. It incorporates features such as accurate key word searches, ‘faceting’ for quickly refining search results by category or brand as well as intuitive ‘type ahead’ suggestions. It will enable users to locate the information they want with fewer keystrokes and guide them to use the most effective query to meet their needs.

The benefit for advertisers is that Mercator Search allows suppliers to sponsor keywords and directory categories. They are also able to raise awareness by appearing at the top of relevant search results pages. This ensures they can achieve high visibility to their targeted audience and maximise ‘click-throughs’ at a measurable cost.

“Research shows that people in business spend at least 10% of their time on the Web just trying to find what they want. This adds up to many wasted hours every month and our task is to make this process as easy as possible. By adding our own tailored website search solution, we can add value to information and contrasts with most other b2b ‘search’ which is simply not up to the task”, Mr Webster stated. “We are constantly developing our products and services and this significant investment for Mercator demonstrates how we intend to keep relevant for our clients”.

Just visit www.worldfishing.net to see the benefits.