No Business Model Required: Following the latest "Google" example for very expensive online legal search?

The problem with very expensive legal search vendors going Lady Gaga over Google because "our customers wanted it" is that Goggle and its competitors like Bing aren't static. They keep adding new feature that WEXIS "customers" also may want. Take for example Google's Knowledge Graph and Bing's Snaphot displays that now accompany search output in the white space to the right of the list of results.

David Pogue's Going Beyond Search, Into Fetch reviews those new features. He notes that Google's Knowledge Graph will display info snips with links from the Graph's database that contains summaries of 500 million entries. Today's WEXIS SEs are supposed to be smart enough to do that already and yesterday's SEs did "plus" research results in sidebar displays but that doesn't mean users won't want this sort of display feature "because Google has it."

However, Pogue also notes that Microsoft's Snapshot display tends to focus on displaying opportunities to spend money. Lexis Advance already provides a sneak peak at out-of-plan output but how did the West Search folks in the Land of 10,000 Invoices not come up with the idea of using search to sell ProView titles since ProView is used to increase WLN adoption rates.

Think of the "Buy Now" ProView eBook sales opportunities in a right sidebar display of WLN search results. Heck, I'm thinking that since a user is already logged into WLN under the OnePassYourAss account scheme, what could be easier for potentially enhancing the recurring revenue stream. No business modeling of this idea is required.

Time to launch the video TR Legal marketing puppet masters may close their powerpoint presentation that explains what's the next next for WestlawNext to West Search geeks. There will be dancing in the conference room. [JH]