Owner Cengage Learning Current status Active Founded 2002 | Website www.HighBeam.com Founder Patrick Spain | |
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Alexa rank 58,896 (as of December 2016) Launched August 2002; 14 years ago (2002-08) Content license Copyright
All rights reserved Headquarters Chicago, Illinois, United States Parent organizations Cengage Learning, THE GALE GROUP INC Profiles | ||
Highbeam research
HighBeam Research is a paid search engine and full text online archive owned by Cengage Learning (through its Gale subsidiary) for thousands of newspapers, magazines, academic journals, newswires, trade magazines, and encyclopedias in English. It is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.
Contents
My desk at highbeam research
History
The company was established in August 2002 after Patrick Spain, who had just sold Hoover's, which he had co-founded, bought eLibrary and Encyclopedia.com from Tucows. The new company was called Alacritude, LLC (a combination of Alacrity and Attitude). ELibrary had a library of 1,200 newspaper, magazine and radio/ TV transcript archives that were generally not freely available.
Original investors included Prism Opportunity Fund of Chicago and 1 to 1 Ventures of Stamford, Connecticut.
Spain stated, "There was a glaring gap between free search like Google and high-end offerings like LexisNexis and Factiva."
Later in 2002, it bought Researchville.com. By 2003, it had increased its archive base to articles from 2,600 publishers. In 2004, it was renamed HighBeam Research. In 2005, it increased its publisher base to 3,500 publishers. In 2006, Oxford University Press, Knight Ridder and The Washington Post archives were added. In 2008, it was purchased by Cengage Learning. Highbeam features many articles by the UK based Trinity Mirror Group.
Highbeam Research is a partner in the Womensforum network and a major content provider for the WomensForum women's issues research website.