Niche search engines are not new. Web sites that help users find people, shop and get business information have existed for years. But the number of these search engines being introduced has greatly increased in recent years. Local search is already a burgeoning subset, with Google Local and many newspapers offering this functionality.
Like consumers, businesses use the Internet for a variety of needs. Sometimes they're looking for all the information they can get, and for that the likes of Google and the Yahoo search engines are used. But more often they're looking for something very specific related to their businesses. That's where vertical search sites come in. Vertical search engines deliver to businesses what the big sites can't without the use of complex keyword combinations: relevant and essential content versus an exhaustive return of information.
On the simplest level, the vertical search buyer is a marketer that wants to be found by the user of one of these specialized search engines. When a business person searches the Web through a search engine or a directory, that person is considered to be in "hunt mode". Marketers understand that this hunt mode means the searcher may very well be somewhere in the buying cycle. That makes search engine results some of the best sources of targeted traffic, whether that traffic originates from "organic" unpaid search listings or paid advertising listings.
To take advantage of this phenomenon some sites have combined vertical search with comparison shopping (example sites
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. This enhances the quality of traffic originating from these sites, as well as the "power" of the search engine itself.
Vertical search engines unite the motivations of the ad space buyer (to be exposed to a targeted audience) with those of the user (to be able to search across an entire vertical market). In achieving these goals, it allows users to collaborate in reviewing search results, and buyers to collaborate in attaining better ranking in universal search engine like Google, and thus lowering their cost of online ad spend.
"Vertical search providers will play an important role in the paid search market in the next five years.
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