Dialog is an online information service owned by

ProQuest ProQuest LLC is an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based global information-content and technology company, founded in 1938 as University Microfilms by Eugene B. Power. ProQuest is known for its applications and information services for libraries, provid ...

, who acquired it from

Thomson Reuters Thomson Reuters Corporation ( ) is a Canadian multinational media conglomerate. The company was founded in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where it is headquartered at the Bay Adelaide Centre. Thomson Reuters was created by the Thomson Corp ...

in mid-2008. Dialog was one of the predecessors of the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...

as a provider of information, though not in form. The earliest form of the Dialog system was completed in 1966 in Lockheed Martin under the direction of

Roger K. Summit Roger K. Summit (born 1930 - Detroit, Michigan) is the founder of Dialog Information Services, and has been called the father of modern online search. He worked for Lockheed in the 1960s, was put in charge of its information retrieval lab, and fr ...

. According to its literature, it was "the world's first online information retrieval system to be used globally with materially significant databases". In the 1980s, a low-priced

dial-up Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to establish a connection to an Internet service provider (ISP) by dialing a telephone number on a conventional telepho ...

version of a subset of Dialog was marketed to individual users as ''Knowledge Index''.Phyllis E. Worden
Knowledge Index
''Journal of Extension'', Volume 26 Number 2, 1988. ISSN 1077-5315 This subset included INSPEC,

MathSciNet MathSciNet is a searchable online bibliographic database created by the American Mathematical Society in 1996. It contains all of the contents of the journal '' Mathematical Reviews'' (MR) since 1940 along with an extensive author database, links ...

, over 200 other bibliographic and reference databases, as well as third-party retrieval vendors who would go to physical libraries to copy materials for a fee and send it to the service subscriber. While being owned by the Thomson Corporation, Dialog consisted of the Dialog, DataStar, Profound, and NewsEdge businesses. Dialog and DataStar were consolidated into Dialog. The news content from Profound and NewsEdge were consolidated, and the market research business from Profound was sold to MarketResearch.com. The NewsEdge business was eventually sold to Acquire Media, now Naviga. Prior to being owned by Thomson, MAID purchased Knight-Ridder Information which included the Dialog and DataStar businesses. MAID renamed itself to be the Dialog Corporation.

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Dialog Solutions

Dialog Dialog is an online information service owned by ProQuest, who acquired it from Thomson Reuters in mid-2008. Dialog was one of the predecessors of the World Wide Web as a provider of information, though not in form. The earliest form of the D ...

Former assets of Thomson Reuters Online databases Online companies of the United States Bibliographic databases and indexes Patent search services Pre–World Wide Web online services Full-text scholarly online databases Scholarly search services {{database-stub

See also

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External links