A longtime online trend is the repackaging of government data by commercial publishers. It happens for many subjects, but the dynamic is the same: a federal agency gathers valuable data, but does an inferior job of distributing it: no online access, release delays, substandard search capabilities, incomplete data sets, and other deficiencies. Publishers and database producers step in, fix all of this, and sell the value-added product to information purchasers, often at substantial prices. The customers go along with this because they cannot abide the substandard government version of the data, assuming one even exists. One of the most prominent examples is the Securities and Exchange Commission's company filings data. Public companies submit to the SEC a regular series of operating and financial reports, which are essential to all sorts of business, financial, and competitive intelligence researchers. For many years the SEC did virtually nothing to distribute this, leaving the field wide open for companies like Disclosure and Standard & Poor's, whose high-priced databases of recycled SEC data have long been standard tools for online searchers. In 1994 the SEC inaugurated its program of online filing and distribution, known as EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering and Retrieval.) Since 1996 all companies have been required to submit most of their filings electronically to the SEC, which makes them available for searching on its Web site (http://www.sec.gov/edgarhp.htm). However, the SEC's EDGAR database is the same old sad story. New filings are not added to the database until at least 24 hours after submission. Search capabilities are incomplete; company searches are done on name only, not the generally more useful ticker symbol. Full text searching is limited to the filing's "header," which has very little information. Filings are output only in cumbersome ASCII format.
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