Stephen Baker over at BlogSpotting writes a short post about vertical search as he watches a Vivisimo presentation on
the topic. Two examples provided by the speaker are firstgov.gov and a Ben Franklin vertical search page on Clusty (Ben Franklin?). It makes me wonder
- is vertical search really a viable milieu? Baker titles his post "Could
Vertical Search Supplant SEO?" The only answer to that seems like a big No - general search and SEO are
just so simple for users.
Conceptually it sounds great, but I don't know of too many consumer facing
vertical search engines worth using. Do readers here use vertical (topic specific) search engines?
Government documents might make sense. Ok, job and classified search, maybe medical. I like GovTrack.us. Does blog search count as vertical search? Does looking at
intersecting tags in del.icio.us count? Local search? Perhaps my interests are just too narrow, but I have a hard
time getting excited about this field relative to it's impact in the abstract. General web and blog search seem
powerful enough that a good query finds me what I need. Some one please turn me on to some exciting vertical search
options.
Is vertical search viable still?
Reader Comments
(Page 1)2. Thanks David, it may well be that the maturation of vertical search into particular verticals well suited is what's underway. We may see a number of good sites in a few particular areas, and use services like Rollyo for the rest of the world.
Posted at 3:15PM on Apr 25th 2006 by Marshall Kirkpatrick
3. Well, as you has pointed out, vertical search is quite powerful in Jobs, Classifieds, and I would add Travel and Shopping to the list. If the user has a specific task in mind (corresponding to a vertical), it's a big overhead to start on web search and then keep narrowing down options. It's even more likely that the the web search itself might be futile. Unlike web search, vertical search is very "transaction oriented", and hence has a space of its own.
Posted at 2:48AM on Apr 26th 2006 by Satish Kadu
4. Your post got me thinking, and I posted about vertical search on our blog today as a result. Like the previous commenter, shopping and travel were the first thing that came to mind for me. In my opinion, vertical search is only as relevant as the results are of value to the consumer.
Posted at 5:16PM on Apr 27th 2006 by Jennifer
5. Education. The library databases are a primary place for vertical search. I'm personally not a fan of vertical search as an initial foray into searching, but librarians love it and there are some tools being developed for libraries that try to combine some of the advantages of social search, i.e. tagging, with vertical search.
1. I think Simply Hired is very compelling in job search. I also think that Fly Spy - when it comes out - will provide a very interesting service around travel search.
So, yeah I think that vertical search is on the horizon, after local search of course.
Posted at 3:11PM on Apr 25th 2006 by David Quiec