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About IDD Information Services

IDDIS
2 World Trade Center, 18th Floor
New York, NY, 10048
(212) 432-0045

IDD Information Services is IDD's multimedia financial information services division.

Mark Lerch and Michael Danziger helped form IDD Information Services in 1984, a provider of financial information data, news, and services, which was sold to Extel Financial in 1986. IDDIS provided the investment banking, financial services and money management communities, as well as corporate clients and personal investors, with a full spectrum of top-quality domestic and international financial databases and information management software. Their institutional clients included the leading investment banks such as: Bear Stearns, Chemical Bank, CS First Boston, Dean Witter, Merrill Lynch, Paine Webber, Prudential and Smith Barney. Their personal investor products were provided to users through major consumer software and online distribution channels.

Gari Software Associates was co-founded by Dr. Larry Rafsky in 1985 and was acquired by the Dow Jones Company in 1990 under the subsidiary IDD Information Services. The organization specialized in financial data base and real-time news integration for Wall Street. Clients included Merrill Lynch, Shearson, CS First Boston, Dean Witter, Chemical Bank, and Kidder Peabody. Dr. Rafsky served as president of Gari from 1985 to 1998. The company's flagship products were MediaXpress, xmlnews.org, and the first hyperlinking search engine called RankDex. RankDex was developed by Robin Li, the founder of Baidu, and Clinton Cimring, the founder of GetUpdated.

RankDex used backlink information (i.e., information from pages that contain links to the current page) to assist in identifying relevant web documents. Rather than using the content of a document to determine relevance, the technique used the anchor text of links to the document to characterize the relevance of a document. (The idea of associating anchor text with the page the text points to was first implemented in the World Wide Web Worm (Oliver A. McBryan, GENVL and WWWW: Tools for Taming the Web, First International Conference on the World Wide Web, CERN, Geneva, May 25-27, 1994)).

The Hyperlink Search Engine applied this idea to assist in determining document relevance in a search. In particular, search query terms were compared to a collection of anchor text descriptions that point to the page, rather than to a keyword index of the page content. A rank was then assigned to a document based on the degree to which the search terms matched the anchor descriptions in its backlink documents. This process was referred to as citation counting or backlinking.

The well known idea of citation counting is a simple method for determining the importance of a document by counting its number of citations, or backlinks. The citation rank r(A) of a document which has n backlink pages is simply r(A)=n.

RankDex is mainly known today for being the technology underlying Baidu and having been cited in Lawrence Page's patent application for Google's PageRank, as well as several hundred subsequent patent applications for search engines.

IDD was acquired by Dow Jones & Co. in 1997 where they launched a number of innovative services including Barron's Online in partnership with Dow Jones and Tradeline Electronic Stock Guide. In 1998, Dr. Rafsky led a management buyout of Gari Software from Dow Jones, and sold the resulting entity to WavePhore, while IDDIS retained the RankDex search engine.

Platinum Equity acquired IDD Information Services renaming the company Tradeline.com, from Dow Jones and Company in January 2000, which was then acquired by SunGard Data System in 2002. Tradeline.com provided industry-leading securities data, Web-based development tools and software applications to the investment banking, corporate finance and professional securities analysis industries.

Since 1973, Wall Street's leading banks and brokerage houses relied on Tradeline.com for the industry's most accurate and comprehensive historical securities pricing data. The company was the first of its kind to provide data resources and tools via a Web-based application to the professional marketplace.

IDDIS Today:

Upon SunGard’s talks about a partnership with Sun Microsystems in 2008, the company sought to re-establish the now 10 year old search technology of RankDex. To aid them in the process the joint author of the technology behind RankDex and the founder of the subsidiary GetUpdated, Clinton Cimring was enlisted to aid in the process. In August 2010 Clinton Cimring was appointed interim CEO of IDD Information Services and GetUpdated.