Amazon - books
Extate - homes
indeed - jobs
cars.com - cars
facebook - people
kayak - travel
itunes - music
???

And a bigger question may be who is going to be the one search engine that will pull all of these specialized vertical search sites together. With an end goal to create one major search engine?

Firstly Vertical Search, as it has recently been named, is not concerned with the list of websites or broadly speakling, the sets of data, that is used as input to the searh engine when answering a search query. A recent example of what has been proclaimed as an innovate and possibly the largest Vertical Search engine is Indeed.com, focusing on the Jobs market. But Indeed.com is no different to Google, Yahoo and any other search engine. We can prove this concept very easily with a quick analysis of processes for which it claims makes it a true operator in the Vertical Search space and then discuss this in conjunction with the actual purpose that Vertical Search was designed to address.

On the contrary to the approach of the traditional search engine to searching the Web, Indeed.com search a defined list of websites that focus only on the recruitment job posting sector. It is this single attribute that people use to push Indeed.com to the front of the Vertical Search space, the fact the engine programmatically excludes, from its search input set, all information sources that do not relate to recruitment job postings. An incredibly simple job, a mere flick of the switch. The problem is that this completely misses the objective that Vertical Search, the theory, strives to address.

For Vertical Search to work the concept of “Context of Information” must be used to deliver truly relevant results, where the search criteria for inclusion in the final result set is determined by both keyword matching and the identification of context. Indeed.com provides, albeit very poorly, a keyword matching capability. What it does not provide, however, is any degree of context. Consequently it cannot be classified as Vertical Search.

Extate on the other hand actually provides methods to specify how the information, supplied in the search box, should be interpreted by the search engine; the ability to ensure context is identified within your query and then used correctly to return the correct results. I applaud the Extate.com team for their progress in this area and their insight in providing context options that are most highly relevant to the Real Estate industry. The most notable example of a context filter in the Extate search engine is in the ability to search for properties with a specific number of bedrooms or those within a specific price range. The latter option being much more fun and interesting to play with.

Now until Indeed.com delivers a platform with the capability to search beyond mere keyword matching, they cannot be included in the category of a Vertical Search engine. The reason, is quite simply, because the only search filter that they provide is keyword matching. Indeed (the verb, not the noun), the firm do make searching for jobs a little easier by amalgamating the most frequented job sites into one, but I do feel there is much hype over a concept that is little more than a keyword matching search engine that just so happens to scrape jobs from other sites.

Thanks,

Dee
Deebark@sbcglobal.net
Wis. USA

Dee