Vertical search engines cater to specific interests

April 4, 2005

Wishing to provide searchers with more relevant information, a number of companies are launching search engines that are uniquely focused on very narrow topics.

Job seekers, shoppers and teens all have new search engines devoted to their interests. So do people who want to find where someone else works.

Driving the search industry's niche evolution is the reality that the general purpose search engines of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN fail to find relevant links for many queries. The theory is that vertical search engines, as they are often called, will be more effective in connecting users with the information they want.

"There are times when you are looking for something discrete and, from an efficiency standpoint, a vertical search engine may help you find what is essential to you," said David Hills, chief executive for LookSmart, a San Francisco company that introduced five vertical search engines last week.

They include Teenja.com for teens, 24HourScholar.com for college students and GoBelle.com for moms on the go. Much of the information they offer comes from articles culled from FindArticles, a LookSmart Web site.

Vertical search isn't new. Such Web sites have existed for years to help users find people, shop, read blog entries and get business information.

What's happening now is a dramatic acceleration in the number of engines rolling out, according to Internet industry analysts and executives. During the past six months, many new engines covering a broad spectrum of subjects have premiered.

Many of them are by small startups like Indeed.com, a Web site for scanning job boards. Another, Answers.com, created by GuruNet, is for reference material. Become.com is for shopping. Ziggs.com helps locate professionals.

Craig Donato, chief executive for Oodle, which searches classified ads on several Web sites, casts his service as a convenience for consumers. No longer do they need to visit multiple Web sites to shop local classifieds, he said.

"When I approached this about 18 months ago, I found that online classifieds were very fragmented," Donato said. "I was checking eBay, I was checking Craigslist, I was checking the newspapers."

Oodle, based in San Mateo, started as a beta last week. It serves only Chicago, Dallas and Philadelphia, but Donato plans to expand it to other areas.

To use the engine, visitors enter their location and what they are looking for. They are then given links to the relevant listings from the original source.

By going vertical, search engine companies hope to reduce extraneous results for users by better guessing users' intent. A query for "great white" -- the name for an '80s rock band and a shark species -- can get very different results on Google compared with an engine that specializes in academic material.

Vertical search engines also can ask questions more quickly. Shopping search engines, for example, can ask up front the color, size and manufacturer of what you want to buy.

Vertical search isn't just for startups. Web giants Google and Yahoo are intensely interested.

Both have their own engines for local information, shopping, images, video and news. At the same time, each is trying to outdo the other with more unusual offerings.

For example, Google, in Mountain View, recently released Google Scholar for academic publications.

Yahoo's latest effort, unveiled last week, is an engine that searches material licensed with the so-called Creative Commons. The text, books and educational material retrieved can be reused by others without violating copyright law.

Amazon.com is trying to outdo them all by making dozens of vertical search engines available on its nascent engine, A9, in Palo Alto. Last month, the company started inviting vertical search companies to make their engines available on its Web site.

A9 users can choose among the dozens currently available. They can then get results from them listed alongside those from A9's general purpose engine, provided by Google.

A strong online advertising market has a lot to do with the interest in niche search, according to analysts. Executives can run targeted text ads next to the results from such companies as Google and Yahoo, a strategy that has proven to be a financial boon to the overall search industry.

"People believe that there's money to be had," said Bill Tancer, an analyst for Hitwise, a firm that measures online traffic. "The challenge is to build enough brand equity and get enough users."

That is especially true for the startups. Many of them have only a trickle of traffic and limited marketing budgets.

Furthermore, the quality of their results can be mixed. Some of the engines search a very limited number of Web pages and therefore return only a small number of links for some queries, judging by the results.

Granted, many of the services are still in beta. Executives promise that improvements and new features are on the way.

Niki Scevak, an analyst for JupiterResearch, a market research firm, believes that vertical search engines specializing in shopping, financial services, media and entertainment, and travel have the best chance of survival. Advertisers are already spending large amounts of money on those sectors.

Hills, from LookSmart, is nevertheless confident that his new search sites will survive, even in the face of potential competition from bigger companies like Google and Yahoo. Users will flock to Web sites that they believe are essential to them, he said.

"You can't wake up in the morning afraid of your competitors," Hills said. "You have to assume that you can do something that they don't do or do something better that they do."

Source: SF Gate

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