Before the World-Wide Web appeared, the drug of choice for information junkies was Lexis-Nexis. The biggest database of news articles, legal cases and company research available, Lexis-Nexis has been an invaluable research tool for a generation of financial analysts, lawyers and journalists.
Lexis-Nexis in recent years was getting downright old-hat, with the Web being the chief reason. Compared with the Web's easy-to-use graphical interface, Lexis' text-only search interface was slow and, while powerful for trained researchers, difficult to use for anyone else. More importantly, the Web has made a lot of information free to access or download.
By contrast, Lexis' time and pay-per-document charging schemes, which forced corporate librarians to guard zealously access to it like high priests protecting a holy shrine, seemed increasingly unreasonable.
In response, Reed Elsevier, Lexis' parent company, has created a product called Lexis-Nexis Universe. LNU is easier and faster to use, a lot cheaper and aimed at giving company employees direct access to its huge database from PC desktops.
Gone in LNU are the modem-only access, text interface and arcane commands, replaced by an easier-to-use Web graphical interface and fill-in-the-blank forms, which let you search by person, company or country. More experienced users do their own Boolean searches using terms such as 'and', 'or' and 'w/2'.
You also can quickly access the topic you want using an ingenious command 'More Like This'. Click on More Like This next to the best result of your searches and LNU will return 25 more documents similar to it. This is faster and more powerful than typing in additional search terms and, in view of how huge the Lexis-Nexis database is, truly necessary.