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