Highbeam Research was an academic search engine famous for having a reliable database specialized in different topics. It was used mostly by professionals and students from Latin America and Europe.
It was a virtual library where, after paying a fee, you could have access to quotes from books, specialized or academic magazines, research, transcripts of radio and television programs. Some of his most prominent sources were the Independent, Washington Post and Mirror newspapers.
The search engine was used by students and professionals. Photo by Chang Duong on Unsplash
It was owned by educational publisher Gael and subsidized by educational content company Cengage. It has been in operation since 2002 and closed in 2018. Today part of its archive is in the Questia Online Library and continues to be used for academic research.
History
Search engines began to be used in the early 90s, given the need to organize the information accumulated on the Internet. As more emerged, they were classified and that is how explorers dedicated only to academic material came to the online world.
Shortly after this research methodology was used, Highbeam Research was born in the network of networks.
It was launched as a teaching and learning search engine in 2002, at the time when entrepreneur Patrick J. Spain sold the American business research company Hoover's and bought eLibrary together with Encyclopedia.com.
Acquiring the signatures allowed him to have access to approximately 1,200 archives of publications that were not available for free on the internet, he started the project of making all this material a search engine and launched it online.
As time passed, Patrick J. Spain acquired more content for Highbeam Research. In 2003 the database had approximately 2,600 publishers, later in 2005 the number rose to 3,500. One of the most significant achievements was in 2006, when they incorporated files from Oxford University Press, Knight Ridder and The Washington Post.
Two years later Highbeam Research passed into the hands of the Gale company and in 2018 they were already partners of the online community site for women Womensforum.
After 16 years on the internet, at the end of 2018 they announced that they were closing and all their content became part of Questia, an online library used by more than 500 thousand students around the world.
By adding its content to Questia, today this virtual education space has about 94 thousand books, in addition to 14 million articles. All selected by librarians and carefully reviewed by teachers.
characteristics
With search parameters you had access to certified material. Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Highbeam Research was a virtual library characterized by using various search parameters to return results on specific topics. To request information you could explore by:
- Name of the author of the book.
- Title of the publication.
- Year the content was made public.
- Specific topic.
The website had an intuitive design, at the top a search engine that just by typing a keyword returns results. The content could also be accessed by sections, everything was categorized to obtain more specific and detailed information.
One of the distinctive aspects of the online library is that from it you had access to newspapers from different countries. It functioned as an international news search engine and could be organized by relevance, publication date and the number of visits they received.
They also had hundreds of publications from specialized magazines on topics of:
- Medicine
- Nursing
- Sport
- Technology
- Hobbies
- Politics
- Finance
- Consulting
- Travels
Other publications featured almanacs, dictionaries, thesauri, and reference works from major universities around the world.
From this portal, students and professionals could track news, research and trends on any subject with the security of having certified information.
How did it work?
Highbeam Research worked under the premise of internet search engines: organize and distribute information on specific topics on the web.
Its interface offered the texts in a textual way, classified the results of a search by relevance, year of publication, a specific topic, browsing history, author's name, also a phrase or keyword.
All the information was on their network and it did not redirect to other pages because they had their own content file. Even the news published in digital newspapers was read from its own interface and in this case it offered readers to continue investigating other publications related to their initial search.
Advantage
For the student and professional community in Latin America and Europe, HighBeam Research represented an easy way to find information for the preparation of classes, assignments, exams, thesis. Some of the advantages were:
- It had content in different formats, such as PDF
- They kept a permanent update of the information. They were constantly growing.
- Guaranteed the veracity of the sources, therefore the contents were reliable
- It allowed access to almost any type of publication, not just books, newspapers and magazines, it also had theses and research.
- They respected copyright by attributing each content to its primary origin and thus enforced the Intellectual Property Law.
- Currently in operation in Questia, it allows you to filter the search to its primary origin and even make reviews of articles.
- Today, through Questia, much of the material is handled by personnel with extensive experience.
Disadvantages
Highbeam Research was a very complete virtual library and although thousands of people used it monthly it had some disadvantages such as:
- Among its policies, it requested a prior payment to be able to access the complete publications. Today the free material on the internet is a great competition for this type of pages.
- They had too much information that was sometimes not well categorized and made content analysis difficult. Without detailed and hierarchical results, the reader could lose valuable information by not being willing to analyze all the material.
References
- Dr Niall O Dochartaigh (2007) Internet Research Skills
- Questia Library online. A Note for Former HighBeam Users. Taken from questia.com
- Luis ÁngelFernández (2016) Living history of the internet
- »Patrick Spain, founder of HighBeam» (2014). Taken from internetnews.com
- Gale acquires HighBeam Research (2012) Taken from archive.org