The Hoover’s Web site is now showing off its redesign. There’s a new logo, with the V in Hoovers looking a bit like a backwards check mark. Maybe that’s not a good way to describe it, but it’s what it looks like to me. And just to confuse editors, there’s no hyphen in the logo, but there is in the company name. That will doubtless throw my copy editor friends into a tizzy. And they’ve got a new tag line: “Intelligence. Insight. Results.”

More important is the structural change. The new design emphasizes the tasks for which business searchers use Hoover’s: Research Companies & Industries, Find Business People, and General Custom Lists. This seems sensible to me. It clarifies the search paths, in language aligned with business information needs. Although my main use of Hoover’s is looking up specific companies, I’d bet that generating lists is much more common usage. Hoover’s also says that they’ve tried to clarify what they mean by financial data, stress their depth of content, and better integrate data in the redesign. I need to play around with it a bit more to see how well it’s accomplishing its objectives.

The redesign is only for the free part of the site; the fee-based still looks the same.