Vertical Search

A vertical search engine is a search engine specialized in a particular sector or niche, allowing you to analyze information in greater depth than a generic form, have fresher results and provide the user with advanced search tools.

The niche search engines are not new. Web sites that help users find people, shop, and get information from companies or businesses have existed for years. But the number of these search engines has increased exponentially in recent years. Local search is a growing segment, with Google Local and many newspapers now offering this functionality.

Businesses, like consumers use the Internet for many different reasons. Sometimes, they try to get as much information as possible and for that, search engines like Google and Yahoo! meet their needs.

However, they also need very specific information related to your industry (vertical search). They allow companies to get what the big search engines can not offer them, without using complex keyword combinations: relevant and essential content without an exhaustive amount of information.

Generic and vertical search engines

A generic search engine (e.g. Google, Yahoo or Microsoft) works by using some programs (called robots or spiders) that crawl the Internet and read as many pages as possible. The search engine then creates an index that contains the words of the documents read, using a proprietary algorithm that ensures that for each query the most significant results are returned.

The vertical search engines send their robots to a limited number of web pages on a particular topic, which allows both to obtain information such as the creation of the index which are more specialized in the sector concerned.

A smaller number of sources that are in a generic form vertical search can also update their information more frequently. Additionally, a vertical search engine provides users with advanced search facilities specifically designed for the sector. The vertical search or thematic represent a new generation after horizontal search patterns such as Google and Yahoo.

Business Week ranked the vertical search engines as part of a “technological renaissance”. In the U.S, The New York Times Company and News Corp’s Fox Interactive Media has invested five million and thirteen million dollars respectively, in exchange for minority stakes in vertical search.

Vertical search user

With the increasing use of traditional search engines, the volume of information they provide has increased substantially. This has become increasingly frustrating for users who have sought information on a specialized topic, such as local information, travel destinations or specific channels for companies.

In the field of business marketing, terms that have very specific meanings return a wealth of results when used as keywords in major search engines. For example, a dentist is looking for information on ceramics, a common material in dental prosthesis.

If you enter the word “ceramic” in Google, this will offer millions of results, but most appearing in the first pages will refer to hobbies such as pottery. Otherwise, if the search is performed on a vertical search sector of dentistry, this will return more relevant results for users.

The buyer in the vertical search engine marketing

At the simplest level, when a person searches the Web using a search engine or directory it is considered to be in “hunting mode.” Marketers understand that this “hunt mode” means that the user is somewhere in the buying cycle.

This causes the best sources of traffic, whether the traffic originates from “organic” or sponsored results. To exploit this phenomenon some vertical search sites combined with comparative shopping (e.g. travel search engines). This increases the quality of traffic generated by these sites as well as the “power” of the search engine itself.

The vertical search together with the motivations of the buyer of advertising space (to be exposed to a target audience) allows the user to search the entire vertical market.

Achieving these objectives, allows users to collaborate in reviewing the results of the searches, and buyers get better rankings in search engines like Google universal, and therefore reduce their advertising spend online. “Vertical search providers will play an important role in the market for paid search in the next five years,” vice president and research director at JupiterResearch, a division of Jupitermedia.