Ingenta partners with Google to enable full text indexing

Ingenta, plc, located in Oxford, UK, the leading provider of online publishing services to academic and professional publishers, announces the successful implementation of full text indexing by Google, the popular and widely used Internet search-engine.  Recent work with Google to enhance indexing of Ingenta.com has seen usage jump dramatically, with Google referral traffic contributing to a record 5.4 million user sessions on Ingenta.com in April.

Since initial changes to their crawler (the “Googlebot”) in late February of 2004, Google has been indexing the freely available metadata on Ingenta.com at a rate of 20,000 to 30,000 pages per day, ensuring that article titles, keywords, author names and abstracts appear in search results for 5.4 million Google users.  As of March 2004, Ingenta has enabled full text access for the crawler, meaning all words in the article, not just the abstracts and keywords, are indexed and searchable on Google. 

Although the crawler is authorized for full text access, all other users are subject to the usual Ingenta.com access control checks.  If a Google user follows a search result that refers to text in the article itself, they will be presented with the abstract page on Ingenta.com and will either be authenticated for full text subscriber access by virtue of their IP address or username and password, or will be offered pay-per-view. 

 “We are extremely pleased to be working with Google to enhance the visibility of publishers’ content,” commented Kirsty Meddings, Ingenta Senior Product Manager.  “Ingenta publishers already benefit from the widest third party distribution network within the industry, and now we are able to broadcast the availability of this key scholarly content to the huge global audience of Google searchers.”

Additional benefits of this initiative are:

• Greater visibility of publisher’s full text articles
• All words in an article are indexed as “searchable” on Google, not just the metadata
• No security issues, as users are always passed to the abstract page and recognized as a subscriber or given pay-per-view options.  Additionally, although full text is indexed it is excluded from the Google page cache.

“Becoming aware of Google’s initiative to index more scholarly content, Ingenta saw the opportunity to increase the visibility of our publishers material.  Ingenta coordinated directly with Google to effect these benefits, avoiding the need for any of the publishers to become involved with the technical details.  This relationship is a natural extension to Ingenta’s role as intermediary between publishers and third-parties,” concluded Kirsty Meddings.

Ingenta has currently switched on full text crawling as a trial for a handful of publishers, including CABI Publishing, Professional Engineering Publishing, FD Communications Inc., and American Ceramic Society, and will now be adding further publishers.

Please visit the Ingenta booth (#17) at the Council of Science Editors 2004 conference to learn more about Ingenta and Google indexing abstracts on Ingenta.com.          

Ingenta contact:
Amanda Procter (UK)
Ingenta plc
Tel: +44 (0) 1865 799022
Email: Amanda.Procter@ingenta.com
       
About Ingenta:
www.ingenta.com
Ingenta is the global market leader in the management and distribution of published scientific, professional and academic research via the Internet, and develops and maintains specialist websites for publishers, self-publishing societies and libraries.

For publishers of scientific, professional and academic periodicals, journals and reference works, Ingenta provides a suite of publisher services including data conversion, secure online hosting, access control and distribution services.  For libraries and information professionals, Ingenta offers collection management and comprehensive document delivery options.  Ingenta’s collection of research content – 13 million articles from more than 6,000 online publications and 27,000 fax and Ariel delivered publications – is accessed by millions of researchers and librarians a month via ingenta.com and other websites.

In October 2000, 2001 and 2002, InfoWorld named Ingenta one of the world’s top 100 e-business companies.  In December 2002 Econtent magazine featured Ingenta in its 100 list of companies that matter most in the digital content industry.  Ingenta is listed on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange.