Blogspeak on Vertical Search

In my last article, I took a close look at Vertical Search Engines - what
they are, their advantages, their challenges, and of course, Google's
efforts in this area. As a followup, I have been researching current
writing about Vertical Search in the blogosphere, looking for trends:
are vertical search engines in, or out? Are new ones coming up, or
existing ones shutting down? Is it all a big bubble?

Looking backwards, Vertical Search seems to have been really big in the
VC community a year ago, causing tremendous excitement; a bunch of
new companies were funded in this space, with the accompanying hype
in tech journals, blogs and at conferences. [I mean no disrespect to the
venerable VC folks, who quite often jump very early on key trends;
I mean, instead, that whenever the major VC firms identify an early
opportunity, tech watchers invariably tend to hype it up too early and
too much!]
From the VC perspective, the excitement seems to have died down. But
new startups continue to get funded in this area, for a variety of
domain searches: Centrro in personal finance products, Krugle in
application source code, Tralliance in travel, Farecast in airplane fares
and meeVee in TV programs.

For users, however, VSEs are just becoming real. The early startups in
this area are beginning to make their presence felt - they are rounding
out their service offerings, their user bases are growing and they are
beginning to get deals with major players. For example, Blinkx recently
signed a major deal with an AOL sub-portal; LookSmart reported
10M unique visitors for the last quarter - small compared to Yahoo!,
but non-trivial.

There is still ongoing discussion about the relative merits and growth
potential of vertical versus horizontal search engines: Erik Dafforn
draws the battle lines between them in the SEOBlog. On the whole,
though, most blog posts are still very positive for what "June's
E-marketing blog" calls the third-generation of Search; for example,
Jonathan Mendez talks about Kayak's great functionality in his
afterthoughts on SES San Jose.

Not all commentaries are positive; the naysayers fall basically into two
camps - those who feel that the VSEs don't offer anything particularly
special over regular search engines, i.e. they do not represent any type
of discontinuous change (such as, this review of Healthline, a consumer
medical search engine, by the Krafty Librarian), and those who feel that
the major horizontal engines will gobble up or build VSEs into their
existing platforms (Tom Evslin made this argument strongly over a year
ago).

People are continuing to think about vertical search from many different
angles. Roger Ehrenberg, in his article on the
possible manipulation of Digg results , provides a unique perspective by
making a parallel between interest-based vertical communities and
vertical search engines. This certainly brings up the question - are
vertical search engine results more accurate and harder to game
because of their focus and expertise in their specific domain?
Susie Kang has written a fascinating article on using
life stages behavioral targeting to improve conversion rates, a process
that is particularly well-suited for vertical search engines. In this article
on Google vs Yahoo, Donna Bogatin takes a different, content-oriented
approach to vertical search : video, images, groups, news, maps, local
and so on. Scott Karp explains Google's Vertical Search problem in the
Zen 2.0 blog.

Looking forward, the leading vertical search engines are continuing to
innovate in a number of areas, to try to differentiate themselves from
the big search engines. The most exciting areas are: integration with
vertical services, "push" models for search results, community aspects
and transaction revenue models. Overall, I think it's safe to say that
(to use a literary cliché) rumors of the death of Vertical Search
are greatly exaggerated; Vertical Search technology, in one form or
another, is here to stay!

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