EconBiz was jointly developed by the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics and the
University and City Library of Cologne (USB Cologne) as a
DFG-funded project. The portal first went online in September 2002. Since 2013 EconBiz ist a service of the ZBW. For the relaunch in October 2010, the metasearch was replaced by a search engine index (Lucene/SOLR). In addition, the STW Thesaurus for Economics was integrated in order to enable automatic searches for synonyms and translations. By integrating other web services, such as the German Electronic Journals Library or the German Journals Database, it is possible to check if and where an item is available (mostly for German libraries). Other services (e.g. check availability in
Google Scholar) are integrated for worldwide availability options. Since 2013, the EconBiz search is based on the open source system VuFind. In 2017, EconBiz had an optical and technical relaunch and was optimized for mobile devices. == Services ==