New Healthcare Vertical

Today, Healthline.com announced $14 million in funding from VantagePoint Venture Partners and Reed Elsevier. Healthcare related searches on the Internet annually exceed 100 million and Healthline plans on capitalizing on this through their taxonomy of over 850,000 medical terms and over 50,000 medical concepts.

http://www.healthline.com/

Alexa Offers Vertical Search Development

Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) subsidiary Alexa Inc., is offering tools that will enable developers to use the Alexa search platform to create vertical search engines and results.

Unlike other search engines offering developer tools, Alexa plans to charge developers for using their specialized search tools.

http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/j94QlE6UbLEMCz/Alexa-Offers-Tools-for-Building-Vertical-Search.xhtml

Building a Successful Vertical Search Site

From the Forbes article "One-Stop Search"

Michael Rosenberg, senior vice president of media and marketing services for Autobytel (nasdaq: ABTL) offers his expert opinion on what he thinks a site needs to do to be successful:

--Exhaustive aggregation of all content in that vertical. If it's not exhaustive, it's not fulfilling its promise.

--Ease of use. Isn't that how Google became so popular?

--Unbiased information. A user needs to trust that the search engine is working for them, not a bunch of paying customers.

--Relevant content. The search results need to be pertinent to the search term. If users need to continually refine their search to get what they want, they will abandon the site. "With vertical search, by definition, you need to go to one engine for jobs, another for travel, and another for business supplies," said Rosenberg. "I think the results at these vertical search engines have to be significantly superior to Google and Yahoo! for consumers to overcome that inconvenience."

Quotable

"I don't think it's a fad," "The general Web search market is pretty much locked up, so vertical search is where the opportunity to create something competitive is." "The advertisers on vertical sites are gaining exposure to would-be buyers who are much closer in time to a purchase decision than the average Google user," - Greg Sterling, Kelsey Group

"The way I view vertical search is that if Google is going to be CBS, I want to be Turner Broadcasting," "In a vertical search engine, a company can run an ad that is different from the one it runs on Google, in the same way that a company runs different TV ads on NBC and MTV" - David Hills, CEO Looksmart. (Note, Looksmart recently built 181 vertical search properties)

"For many marketers, a vertical search engine makes a lot of sense" - Gary Stein, Jupiter Research

Beyond Google

The Wall Street Jounal recently published a special report on the variety of vertical search engines available.

The benefit of using a vertical search engine according to WSJ:

"Instead of trawling through billions of Web pages to find results, the way the big engines do, vertical engines limit their searches to industry-specific sites. And they usually serve up lists of actual things -- such as houses for sale or open jobs -- instead of links to pages where you might find them. So you spend less time skimming through irrelevant links to find what you want. On top of that, the sites let you filter the results by factors such as salary, price or location."

The report labels several best of breed vertical search sites for a variety of subjects. Their recommendations:

To find books: Bookfinder.com, RedLightGreen.com, NetLibrary.com
To find job listings: SimplyHired, Indeed, Yahoo HotJobs
To find Industry Information: GlobalSpec, Scirus, IT.com, LawCrawler
To find a home to buy or rent: Trulia, HomePages, Oodle
To find flights and hotels: SideStep, Kayak, FareChase, Mobissimo
To find phone numbers/addresses: Argali White & Yellow
To find reference info: Answers.com

Top Search Terms - November 2005

Neilsen/NetRatings released the top 10 search terms for November 2005:

Search Term / Number of Requests (000)

1 Ebay / 13,871
2 Google / 13,301
3 Yahoo / 7,997
4 MapQuest / 7,431
5 Yahoo.com / 6,528
6 Pogo.com / 4,062
7 Walmart / 3,688
8 Ask Jeeves / 3,389
9 MSN / 3,166
10 eBay.com / 3,125

These results reveal that users do not go directly to the URL of the destination site. Users are using search engines to search for other search engines. These results show that users are NOT likely to be loyal to one search engine. Interestingly, the first 22 terms were not topical. The highest ranked topical term - Weather, came in at #23.

Further, they release the Top 10 Search Engines Ranked by Search Share for November 2005:

Provider / Vertical Searches (000) / Share of Searches

1 Google Search / 2,365,998 / 46.3%
2 Yahoo! Search / 1,194,519 / 23.4%
3 MSN Search / 583,304 / 11.4%
4 AOL Search / 350,899 / 6.9%
5 My Way Search / 129,555 / 2.5%
6 Ask Jeeves Search / 119,679 / 2.3%
7 EarthLink Search / 32,172 / 0.6%
8 Dogpile.com Search / 31,563 / 0.6%
9 Netscape Search / 30,434 / 0.6%
10 iWon Search / 27,670 / 0.5%

New Computer & IT Training Vertical

EdComp is the Computer and IT training search engine with a database of over 140,000 resources. Again, since this is a focused vertical search engine, users will find only relevant computer and IT results versus the general purpose Google search of the same.

As a means of making the search experience easier for the user, they provide a huge list of predefined search terms.

New Vertical Search Engine

VerticalSearch.com recently launched a beta site with B2B results for transportation, telecom, health, construction and several other industries. The results are aggrigated from several hundred B2B verticals.

The Portal Example

Remember the early days of the Internet? Everyone wanted to be a "Portal" and become the one stop destination for as many users as they could get.

These portals were unable to fulfill the needs of their users as more focused niche players entered the fray and users began to go to the niche players directly. Monster filled the job search void, Expedia the travel, Buy.com the shopping, etc.

Could this happen again? Of course.

Many more nice players will pop up, some will do a great job at organizing data better than the big boys and then and become big themselves.

Why go Vertical?

If you are a job seeker, would you rather go to SimplyHired or Google?

If you are looking to purchase a camera, would you go to Shopping.com or Google?

To find the best fares from Los Angeles to New York, why go to Google when you can use Kayak?

The point is, the results are better when you use the verical search services. It can be argued that Google does provide a bit of a vertical experience but why bother with Google when you can eliminate all the associated clutter by using the direct verical experience.

SES NY: Danny Sullivan's Take on Vertical Search

At SES New York, Danny Sullivan urged those in attendance to get "familiar with vertical search opportunities". He further stated "I can't say it enough. Vertical search is going to take over, the people who are going to win are the people that unerstand shopping search now".

As evidence of this trend, Danny noted that Google now placed 10 top vertical search results above all others when the query could be interpreted as vertical. Google is thus placing higher relevance on vertical search results while pushing down the organic listings.

http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3487171

Om Malik's Take

Om Malik is a senior writer at Business2.0 and the author of "Om Malik's Blog", which has many interesting articles on his future Internet industry thoughts. This recent entry deals with the current buzz in Silicon Valley regarding vertical search:

http://gigaom.com/2005/03/16/3554/

The Four Horsemen of Vertical Search

ClickZ article on a recent study by Jupiter Research predicting that the bulk of online paid search growth will be driven by the "four horsemen" of vertical seearch.

The Jupiter Research report is titled "Veritcal Search: Early Marketers Will Reap Rewards of Low Pricing". The report predicts that paid search will evolve in a similar fashon as the television and magazine markets evolved.

The "four horsemen" are the verticals: retail, financial services, travel and media & entertainment. These markets account for nearly 80% of 2004's online ad spend.

http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3485111