Big 4 in Vertical

Vertical search is an area in considerable ferment. Much VC funding has flowed to the area, under the assumption that the big search players are so broad that there is opportunity for sites devoted to specific niches.

According to Jupiter Research, four primary vertical categories that would be likely to account for the majority of spend: retail, financial services, travel and media and entertainment. But many other niches are getting funding.

Homepage Vertical Search Usability

Interesting blog post in ZDNet comparing the vertical experiences on both Yahoo and Google.

Both fail to launch direct to vertical from the homepage:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/index.php?p=240

Real Estate Conference to Focus on Search

More than a dozen industry leaders and innovators are planned tol take the stage at an intense half-day boot camp designed exclusively for real estate agents and brokers.

The focus of this years boot camp will be Internet strategies such as search engines, lead generation and vertical search, confirmed speakers include Sam Sebastian, Director of Classified and Local at Google.

http://www.inman.com/connectsf/sf.aspx

Google To Unveil Open Source Vertical

Google plans on unveiling a new vertical to go against SourceForge at the Open Source Convention.

Google launched a Linux version of its photo-sharing app, Picasa, in May. The company also announced a beta Linux version of Google Earth 4 in June.Open-source rumors have surrounded Google before. In February Google was rumored to be developing a Linux-based operating system for the desktop. That rumor was denied by Ubuntu founder (and first space tourist!) Mark Shuttleworth.

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2006/view/e_sess/8824

The Rule of Three In Search

Interesting article in MediaPost regarding eye tracking results. These eye tracking studies have been conducted over and over and over again:

"In this study, we are looking at interactions with Google, compared to MSN and Yahoo. Recently, one finding in particular seemed to be screaming out to be noticed. Being a compassionate sort of researcher, I listened.

When we looked at interactions with the top sponsored ads, there was a notable difference between MSN, Yahoo and Google. On MSN and Google, the percentage of clicks happening on these top ads seemed to be in line with previous studies done both by us and by others. But the amount of activity on the Yahoo ads seemed to be substantially higher. We started out by looking at first fixations, or the first place people looked on the page, even for a split second. Here, the engines were all in the same ball park, with 83.7 percent of first fixations in top sponsored ads for Yahoo, compared to 86.7 percent for MSN and 80.6 percent for Google.
Then, we looked at where the first activity on listing happened; where on the page did people start actually scanning listings? Google held a good percentage of eyeballs, keeping 12.4 percent of the users, while MSN had a significant defection issue, losing 36.6 percent of the people who first fixated in the top sponsored ads. But Yahoo lost the fewest, with only 5.5 percent choosing to look elsewhere. And finally, Google had 25.8 percent click-throughs on these ads, and MSN had 16.7 percent (yes, this is low, but MSN was dealing with a number of issues at the time of the study). Yahoo led the pack with a 30.2 percent click-through rate. In fact, for the first time ever in our research, a sponsored link (the number one top sponsored) out-pulled the No. 1 organic link, at click-through rates of 25.6 percent vs. 14 percent. This was a complete reversal of the click-through ratios we saw on the other two engines.

For whatever reason, Yahoo's top sponsored ads seemed to be locking searchers into their part of the results page to a much greater extent than Google and MSN.
Why? What the heck was going on? Better ads? Not really. If anything, Google's ads seemed a touch more relevant.

Location, Location, Location

Part of it was real estate. Another interesting comparison we did was to look at the percentages of screen real estate devoted to various sections of the page. Yahoo has gone out of its way to make the top sponsored ads the dominant feature on a results page at 1024 by 768 screen resolution. At this size, the ads take up 23 percent of the real estate, compared to approximately 16 percent for Google and Yahoo. This pushes organic listings on Yahoo perilously close to the fold. "

http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=45853

Become.com's new "Search Zoom" Feature

Become.com, the vertical search engine known for combining product focused search with comparison shopping, announced "Search Zoom", a feature designed to let customers sort and prioritize results by information type.

Search Zoom categorizes that information, enabling users to easily browse only their preferred research sites. Then, with one click, Become.com's "Shop" function allows users to view a range of merchants and prices from which to buy the product. Users who prefer seeing all research results will benefit from Search Zoom's labeling of results by type.

www.become.com

Medstory: Intelligent Search?

The site's called Medstory, and it's a consumer search product that helps you find your way around the fields of health and medicine.

It's the baby of Valley veteran Alain Rappaport, a French-born scientist and technologist who's been working for years to refine the information search process.
In practice, the premise is fairly simple. As Rappaport puts it, "Most search engines return links, after which you have to read and decide what's important. It's left up to you to do the hard work."

"The difference with Medstory is that it will do this work for you ... extracting the information that is most relevant to your query."

By mixing traditional algorithm search technology with a computerized editing function that links together documents with similar concepts, rather than simply linking familiar terms, Rappaport and Co. could be onto a significant advance in the search terrain.

Jupiter: Strong Demand for Health Search Engines

JupiterResearch has found that 71 percent of online consumers use search engines to find health-related information, but only 16 percent find the information they are looking for. Highlighted in a new research report, "Health Search: Assessing Consumers' Demand for Health Vertical Search Engines," are recommended strategies for general and specialized search engines to attract and retain a loyal user base.

"Despite strong demand for health information, most online consumers' search experiences are negative," said Monique Levy, JupiterResearch Senior Analyst and author of the report. "The combination of high demand and poor experience means there is a significant opportunity for better engines and products in the market."

Sixty percent of online consumers use general search engines with Google leading the pack by a significant margin. Additionally, 42 percent of online consumers already use various Health Search Engines such as WebMD, AOL Health and MSN Health & Fitness.
"Search engines must work toward striking the right balance between search efficiency, quality of results and proprietary feature sets," said David Schatsky, President of JupiterKagan. "Online consumers are interested in features that improve and facilitate their searches as long as they don't add an unnecessary layer of complexity."

www.jupiterresearch.com

Will Search Personalization Eliminate Vertical Engines?

A white paper was recently released by Slack Barshinger and Search Channel touting the emergence and merits of vertical (or specialized) search engines--The Emerging Opportunity in Vertical Search. The authors' basic assertions are on point. Vertical engines are a great source of targeted information for niche categories or situations in which the general results of the Big 4 (Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask) are not customized to the intent or profile of the searcher.
One of the examples in the white paper is a dentist who searches for "ceramics" on Google only to find thousands of results related to enthusiast hobbies like pottery. The authors point to DentalProducts.net as a more relevant source of information for this searcher. Makes perfect sense.

However, would that searcher need (or want) to go to DentistProducts.net if The Big 4 could identify him or her as a dentist and, based on past search activity, better narrow the results to include only those from directories like DentalProducts.net and the various sites included in its index?

Searchers don't want to perform multiple queries--nor do they want to go to different search engines to find different pieces of information. But today, they have no choice. As the white paper points out, refining the search as "dentists and ceramics" on Google yields no better results. And, on the flip side, that dentist is not going to use DentalProducts.net to find a good lunch spot near the office or a Christmas present for his niece.

Clearly, until search results can be better customized on the general engines, many searchers will prefer (and find value in) going to an engine or directory tailored specifically to their needs. But think about how far the Big 4 have come in just the past couple years in terms of personalization and tools for refining search queries. The time is not long before the general engines will be able to deliver results as relevant as today's vertical engines--if not more, when overlaid with past browsing behavior, social networking, tagging, etc.

Another Real Estate Vertical

CityCribs, a marketplace for real estate rentals and sales, has completed the first stage of a national rollout. CityCribs provides homeowners and realtors with marketing products when renting or selling homes.

Basic advertising in the new cities will be offered free of charge. In addition to providing advertisers with an easy to use website and a large captive audience of home seekers, CityCribs streams all listings though RSS distribution to vertical search engines like Google Base, oodle, Edgeio and other partners.

www.citycribs

Looksmart : "We're Turner, Google is CBS"

LookSmart CEO, Dave Hills recently remarked compared Google to CBS and LookSmart to the upstart Turner Broadcasting network in the ways they differentiate.

LookSmart operates three lines of business: a network of 181 vertical Web sites in 18 categories such as finance, family, health and education; a pay-per-click ad network; and a social search/ tagging/ bookmark-sharing technology platform called Furl.net. The company’s been around longer than Google and been through a number of directional changes.

http://multichannelmerchant.com/webchannel/seo/6-14-06-LookSmart-Hills/

Health Articles, Selected by the Pros

This month, RealAge, Inc., the leading source for personalized health information, will introduce Smart Search, a new vertical search engine for health and wellness. With an active user base of over 5 million people, RealAge is meeting consumers' demands for a quick quality-over-quantity search experience that produces reliable, relevant results that are hand-selected. RealAge employs a team of professionals who select information based on standards set by the RealAge Scientific Advisory Board.

The Smart Search engine at RealAge.com does not simply crawl Web sites amassing any and all data that may be vaguely relevant -- or even irrelevant -- regardless of whether it's credible or not. "RealAge Smart Search gives users the 48 search results they want and need, not the 3 million they'll never look at," explains RealAge CEO, Charles Silver. "It's the smartest, most efficient way to find health information online."

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060705/nyw035.html?.v=58

Search for Vertical Topic Masters

Goulash Enterprises, LLC, an Internet marketing company and creator of www.thulix.com announces that it is looking for Topic Masters worldwide.

Topic Masters are human editors that select a specific Topic and search the Internet to find as much relevant information about that subject as is possible. Once the links are found they are categorized into subtopics in order to allow the user to find what they are searching for as quickly as possible, than the links are published on a Topic Page.

Thulix Topic Pages are aimed at people interested in a particular Topic that will enable them to find the most relevant information pertaining to that niche subject on one page quickly. Ad companies will also be able to target a focused audience.

ReedLink Distributing with RSS

ReedLink, a vertical search engine, recently added RSS technology on its site in order to distribute its content online. Users can access this content by clicking the RSS button available on the header of all pages on www.reedlink.com. A pre-selected feed of up-to-date articles and product information, including individual product specifications, will be sent regularly, as well.
www.reedlink.com

Vertical Images on AdSense

Google is beta testing vertical images within AdSense. Vertical images displays a related generic image within the ad unit, which then links to a results page similar to the results page seen when clicking on an Ad Links keyword.

This is an example of how this looks.