9W Search Releases Beta Financial Search Engine

Austin, Texas-based financial search engine startup 9W Search will this week release a beta version of its web-based financial information search engine, with a redesigned user interface improved for mobile devices, as the vendor continues to expand the platform’s features and content prior to a formal launch.

While previously, the vendor presented users—including financial advisors, analysts and researchers—with a list of menu items to navigate their way to the information they are looking for, the new UI presents the same options as distinct buttons, each with brief explanations of what each heading means. This makes the platform easier to navigate if users are accessing it via a smartphone or tablet device, says 9W Search chief executive Susan Strausberg.

The search engine also now provides a consolidated view of financial data items and ratios so users can integrate them into a single report—which can now be exported as PDF documents or spreadsheets, or can be shared via email, Linked­In, Twitter and other file-sharing sites—to compare figures from a company’s most recent quarterly or annual filings, rather than running reports separately for financials and ratios. This is an initial step toward enabling users to create and save tearsheets by pulling together any desired data point from the platform, and will support a portfolio feature currently being developed, Strausberg says.

The vendor sources the data for its platform from company filings and financial data provider Edgar Online, which applies XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) tags to the data. In addition, 9W Search is now adding industry-specific taxonomies to the platform to enable it to capture more data from Edgar Online and provide users with more targeted information. The platform is intended to help users cut through the amounts of data generated from XBRL reporting—the extensive nature of which enables companies to report to a highly granular level, but makes it difficult for users to consume such large amounts of data—and to quickly access the information critical to their industry, Strausberg says.

For example, beyond the standard cash net income items that users would want to see for all companies, such as revenues and assets, the taxonomy for the oil and gas industry may include dry hole figures, while the real estate taxonomy may include revenue per square foot, she adds. Furthermore, the vendor is building intelligence into the platform that will enable it to automatically list the appropriate industry-specific taxonomies, depending on the companies a user has selected to research. 

The enhancements make the platform easier to navigate via smartphones or tablet devices.