Verticalization of search : More relevancy, solution to Invisible Web.
Google is leading the way in “horizontal search” which in simple words means “generic search”. It covers a very wide spectrum with no inclination to particular niche. Over the last few years, there has been a rapid evolution of new kind of search engines which specialize in providing you results from a particular niche they are made for. These are “Vertical Search Engines” or “Vortals”. A few i remember right now are : SimplyHired.com(Job), Indeed.com(Job), Kayak.com (Travel) and alot others.
With the kind of money being pumped in the Vortals, the industry experts estimate this to reach over $1bn by 2009. Clearly, it is going to be a big thing in the very near future. Lets take a quick look.
Vertical Search - so what is it exactly?
As i mentioned above, vertical search engines or “vortals” are niche specific search engines. Instead of generic results, they return niche specific results.
What good they are?
1. Increases search relevancy
One of the key aim of all searches is to find relevant information on web. With the kind of information available on the web and the ever increasing span of the invisible web it becomes hard to find that relevant information. Vertical search engines address this problem and this ultimately leads to better user experience.
Consider this : You want to search for a job, say project manager in IT. You go to Google and search for it. Undoubtedly you get a tons of results (which includes tons of irrelevant results as well, like a Wikipedia page on “Project Manager”), but, what if you are given a choice to filter results for jobs within a certain distance from a location of your choice, say 10 miles, and to filter results by company name, and job type, and employer type, and….. I guess, that will be far better. Vertical Search Engines do this kind of stuff.
2. Solution to Invisible Web?
Lately we have all been hearing a lot about the invisible web. The part of web that is not yet index by search engines and remains deeply hidden from the searchers. Could vertical search engines be a solution to the problem of invisible web? Just imagine, instead of trying to grab all the web pages from all the niches, if a search engine only tries to grab web pages for a particular niche, will not it perform far better and grab “much more” and “relevant” web pages, though in the specific niche.
3. More contextual marketing for your business meaning higher ROI.
Vertical search means vertical ads in those right-side-columns or otherwise, which means you get more targeted audience in your PPC campaigns. And the more the context is matched, the higher will be ROI. Right?
These are the very general ones i could relate to right now. There would be many others that we could indirectly relate to these vortals, like if you are able find the relevant information easily and quickly because the SE only returns the niche specific results, you “save time and efforts” which could be spend more appropriately on your core business.
Vortals are here to stay.