HighBeam Research

» see highbeam.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

by the time i had a reason to want something like highbeam, the reason had already evaporated. engineering coursework in a turkish university sends you to datasheets and conference papers, not to twenty-year-old newspaper clippings, and the newspaper clippings that i did occasionally need were in turkish and not in any american aggregator. two hundred dollars a year for english-language press archives was not a decision i ever had to think about.

highbeam started in august 2002, and the founder is the interesting part. patrick spain had built hoover's, the company-profile business, sold it, and then went shopping in the wreckage of the dot-com bust. he picked up elibrary and encyclopedia.com from tucows and stitched them into one paid search engine. the company was called alacritude, which nobody remembers, under a brand that a lot of people do.

what it sold was access rather than software. newspapers, magazines, academic journals, trade press and newswires going back roughly a quarter of a century, all full text, all searchable in one box. it opened with around twelve hundred titles and was up past thirty-five hundred publishers by 2005. the number usually quoted at its height is eighty million documents from six and a half thousand publications.

none of that was free anywhere. that was the entire business. in the years before every newspaper put its own archive online and then took it back behind its own paywall, highbeam was where a freelance journalist or a graduate student went to find a 1994 article from a trade magazine that no longer existed.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what you were actually buying ~

the pitch was aimed at individuals, which made highbeam unusual. the rest of that industry sold to institutions: a university signs a site license, and the student gets in through the campus login without ever seeing the price. highbeam sold to the person, monthly, with a credit card, which is why it advertised on the open web and why it had a customer support phone number printed on the site.

gale, the reference-publishing arm of cengage, bought the company in 2008. gale's own business was the institutional one, so what it acquired was a direct channel to consumers it had never had. that channel was also the part of the operation with the worst economics, since consumer subscribers churn constantly and cost real money to acquire, while a university renews its license every year without being sold to again.

~ the wikipedia thousand ~

in april 2012 highbeam gave a thousand full-access accounts, a year each, to active wikipedia editors. a subscription cost over two hundred dollars, so the donation was worth a couple of hundred thousand dollars on paper and cost the company nothing in marginal terms. it was one of the first big deals of what became the wikipedia library, and it worked exactly as intended: editors with a research paywall opened to them went and sourced articles that had been sitting unsourced for years.

it also left a mess that outlived the company. those editors cited what they read, and the citations pointed at highbeam.com. when the archive closed, thousands of footnotes across wikipedia kept pointing at a host that no longer answered. the articles were still real and the references were still accurate, but the link in the middle had stopped working, which is the standard failure mode of citing anything that lives behind somebody else's subscription.

~ buried twice ~

the retirement notice went up in late 2018 and read like every notice of its kind. full access until the final date, pro-rated refunds to the card on file, export your saved articles now because saved searches and alerts cannot be exported at all. the last capture of a working front page in the internet archive is 16 december 2018, and from the next day the address only hands back a redirect.

subscribers were pointed at questia, gale's other consumer product, on the argument that it covered the same ground. it did not, quite: questia was books and academic journals for undergraduate essays, highbeam was press archives. two years later cengage shut questia too, on 21 december 2020. so the collection got moved once for its own good and then killed anyway, and the sixteen years of press archives that were the whole reason anybody paid are now scattered back across whichever publisher still holds the rights.

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