GraphicBrain.com launches Google-based search engines

The GraphicBrain.com website now offers four search engines focused to the printing and publishing industry. Users can search within different types of information: magazine articles, vendor websites, online discussion forums and blogs. GraphicBrain.com uses a filter placed on top of Google, the most widely used search engine in the world. Only websites that have been handpicked by the people of VIGC (Flemish Innovation Center for Graphic Communication), the organization behind GraphicBrain.com, are shown in the results. The numbers however are impressive: more than 110 different magazines, more than 3,500 vendor websites are in the GraphicBrain.com-filter.

‘With this relaunch of GraphicBrain.com as a specialized search engine, we are back at the origins,’ explained Eddy Hagen, managing director of the Flemish Innovation Center for Graphic Communication (VIGC), which is the organization behind GraphicBrain.com. ‘When we first launched GraphicBrain.com in 2001, it was one of the first, or maybe even the first “vertical” search engines. The amount of information on the internet, in search engines was at that moment growing exponentially and certain terms are used in different industries, with completely different meanings. General search engines therefore deliver very mixed results. Vertical search engines however are more focused, deliver more relevant results.’

The first version of the GraphicBrain.com search engine had only a limited impact: the results looked different from what people were used to and after a few years technology started showing fatal errors. As a consequence, the search engine was stopped in 2005. GraphicBrain.com itself was redesigned as an information portal for the members of VIGC.

‘We have learned from the past,’ Hagen admitted. ‘Our new search engines are based on solid technology that almost everybody uses, almost every day: Google. All our search engines are free to use, for everybody. This was part of the agreement with Google. The combination of the Google expertise on search technology and the expertise of VIGC on the printing and publishing industry makes GraphicBrain.com a unique tool. The filter that GraphicBrain.com applies is one of the biggest projects in this type of Google applications.’