I just read Steve Rubel‘s comments on the impact of blogs, communities, and technology in general on PR in the book “online marketing heroes” by Michael Miller (excerpt for download here). A lot of what Steve says is true and cannot be said often enough to decision makers on the side of companies considering their role in the digital world.

However, there’s one thing that I don’t quite agree with and that’s the notion of the free and ubiquitious Google search having replaced proprietary information management services such as LexisNexis, Dow Jones Factiva or especially strong in Germany, Genios, for PR practitioners.

While everyone uses Google, I believe it’s does not cater for every information need a PR professional has. It’s great for the quick overview, but it’s crap for very targeted search. Google does not aggregate print coverage, nor does it provide reliable full-text search for online. Ever tried to find background information on a specific company via Google? I mean information that’s stored in authorities’ databases, financial records, executive profiles and biographies beyond what’s being published by them on their websites. Or have you ever tried to find an original news agencies’ report on a hot industry issue immediately via Google?

So issue number one with Google is the type and level of depth of the information they make accessible. We tend to think that everything is on the web, but it’s not. Actually a huge chunk of the world’s information is stored in other repositories.

Issue number two from a PR’s perspective is the way Google structures search results. The secret algorithm’s assumption that what’s linked more is probably more relevant to the audience is good for up-to-the-minute online content. But it makes the non-linked, but still interesting stuff extremely hard to find. I admit, I haven’t used “social search” sites like Mahalo.com much, they might get closer to what I’m after but I doubt they provide the volume and breadth necessary to make them really useful – at least yet. Thirdly, at this point, Google doesn’t provide any type of qualitative analytics on the search results.

These three areas, depth of information, structure of results and built-in analysis is exactly what differentiates professional information management services from supposedly do-all Google. To be honest, I would have been lost more than once, preparing a pitch presentation or reacting to a client issue in a timely way without theses tools my agency pays for to give us some competitive edge.

[Disclosure: Dow Jones Factiva is a client of mine at Hotwire.]