Researcha “relaunched” with Alacra-ity

A few years back, in its previous incarnation, Researcha described itself as a “global community for information professionals”.  It now wants to be “the premium business information source” and will probably reach a wider audience.  By the way, that’s not just “premium” as in high quality, but also premium as in costs money.

Researcha offers a pay-as-you-go business model with free registration and searching.  It’s powered by Alacra and (here’s the disappointing bit) strange to relate, pretty much the whole site happens to look amazingly similar to Alacrastore, errr, make that near enough identical…yep, even down to the strapline.

Never mind, the site – both sites that is – are easy to navigate and the information is helpfully displayed.  For instance, an Industry search displays your results by data type: Public Companies followed by Investment and Credit Research, followed by Market Research, followed finally by News.  There’s also a useful little section at the end listing trade associations and publications websites.

There is a good range of sources all helpfully listed and hyperlinked under the Publisher tab.

The pay-as-you-go model is useful for obtaining information as required while controlling costs – no large upfront fee needed, but I’m not sure it works across all types of data.

Take the news section.  News articles cost $9.95 each which – although the standard fee for an article on a commercial database such as Dialog’s NewsRoom – is quite pricey, certainly enough to prevent any browsing, but also I’d question whether you need to pay it much of the time, often an equivalent (or even the same) article can be found for free on the web.  Or compare this with Highbeam which would give you access to many thousands of news articles for $29.95 a month or $199.95 a year (they also offer bespoke prices for group subscriptions).

Market data and company information is a different matter, you can only find so much for free, but even then it’s worth checking around.

Conclusion?  It is an easy site to use, but it’s just one of many sites offering business information, so while I’d definitely add it to the list, I’ll still check around elsewhere before purchasing any data from it.  Oh, and what a shame it’s nothing new after all, just Alacrastore under another name.  Not at all disruptive!

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3 Responses to Researcha “relaunched” with Alacra-ity

  1. Sarah says:

    Hi again Jessica,
    Just had a thought – you might find FUMSI worth a visit. FUMSI stands for Find, Use, Manage and Share Information and is full of useful articles on sites and searching.

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