(Coverage of the SES San Jose conference will continue through its end.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

Philip James, the CEO of Snooth, was the first speaker, and he pointed out that no more than three vertical search engines are likely to do well in any particular market.  This should keep things manageable for webmasters and SEO specialists.

Paul Forster, the CEO of Indeed, later stepped in with some specific tips.  As reported by Thomas McMahon, "Paul shared that if you want exposure in vertical engines you can submit structured feeds to get your listings in the organic results.  You can also purchase ads much like Google AdWords.  Depending on the site, you may also be able to sponsor areas of the site or get ads in emails."

Standard SEO tactics are important, too, though, as Jonathan Dingman, Digitally Imported‘s vice president of marketing, reminded the crowd.  Links will give you a serious leg up in vertical search.

Good luck at getting ahead in engines other than Google.

Her article covers a number of different examples of search verticals and shows how they are succeeding in meeting the relevancy demands of their users in much more efficient way than Google may ever be able to do. However with that said, the end goals of vertical search and the end goals of Google seem to me to be divergent.

Vertical search has the ability to ask very specific questions that they know are relevant to the query. Google on the other hand cannot make assumptions as to the specific needs of the user. Given the strength of branding that Sramana imagines these vertical search tools to obtain, she believes circumventing the need for Google and going right to the vertical search could pose a long term business problem for Google that they might never be able to over come.

Still the following quote from Sramana got me really thinking:

“At the back of my mind is a vision that is much bigger than vertical search. It is Web 3.0, a summation of context, community, commerce, content, vertical search and personalization. In the end, new brands able to build deep, rich, highly personalized Web 3.0 user experiences would become Google’s real competition.”

How do you feel about this conclusion? Does it feel to you like vertical search from a strong brand could be the challenge that Google is unprepared to meet?

Comments

Well-established categories such as retail and travel will continue to lead vertical search spending. The report says the best opportunity for vertical search is in growth categories such as financial services, automotive, and health, in which combined search spending will grow more than 94 percent to $3.4 billion in 2011.

"Shopping or retail, as a relatively mature online category, leads the way in attracting spending and can provide critical lessons for other vertical categories," explained Sapna Satagopan, JupiterResearch Analyst and lead author of the report.

"This category is focused on developing and growing the engagement on site, a critical element to building consumer traffic and consequentially, marketer spending."

The report also says that vertical search sites must experiment with ad formats, especially categories that are not quite as adept at implementing the pay-per-click model of advertising. In addition, taking advantage of partnerships formed with sites that already have an established following will be key driving vertical search traffic and enhancing content without incurring additional costs.

"As vertical search sites focus on integrating various types of content, differentiation will increasingly depend on organization of the content and useful site features," said David Schatsky, President of JupiterResearch.

"Shopping search sites are essentially research destinations that provide rich content, information, and tools to help lead searchers to the right sites or merchants. These elements will become especially important as the process of aggregating data becomes relatively more streamlined and searchers look to address specific needs."

Alex Iskold, Tony Hung, and Frank Gruber made their way into Spock’s invitation-only testing, and have come back with high opinions of the search engine.  It’s “Vertical Search Done Right,” according to Iskold – check out his article for several intriguing screenshots.

But because Spock is so good, our attention is drawn to its weak spots.  (Think, if you will, of a new car – just one door ding or paint chip would kill me every time I saw it.  On a 15-year old junker, that ding would be rather less important than the missing side view mirror and mismatched hubcaps.)

“The main problem is that Spock is likely to have much more complete information about celebrities and well known people than about ordinary people,” Iskold writes.  “The reason for it is the amount of data.  More people are going to be tagging and voting on the president of the United States than on ordinary people.”

Hung echoed that statement, adding, “Sure, Spock.com could bank on the fact that social networking usage will rise to a high enough level that it self-populates its own database past the tipping point – but is that a viable strategy?”

And as for Gruber, well . . .  It’s hard to say whether it’s his fault or Spock’s, but apparently several of Gruber’s friends got Spock invites that he didn’t mean to send.  An example of great public relations work came as a result of this problem, however, when “The Spock Team” responded to Gruber’s post, gave several possible reasons for the unwanted emails, and signed off with an apology and a promise to fix the issue.

All in all, Spock’s shaping up nicely, and when it comes out of that private beta mode, we’ll be sure to let you know.

“Here we go!” begins the related post on SupplyFrame’s blog.  “Today we closed our series B round led by USVP for $7M.   Our previous investors, Clearstone and Arcturus, also participated.”

Jim Armstrong, the Managing Director of Clearstone Venture Partners, then hinted at the key to SupplyFrame’s success.  “Consumer search has historically been successful with performance-based advertising and lead generation,” Armstrong stated in a press release.  “SupplyFrame is delivering the same model inside the business process with performance and search-based advertising.  This is an exciting change for the industry.”

Of course, another way to find the key to SupplyFrame’s success might be to look at its actual site.  The main page offers, among other things, a SupplyFrame Search PlugIn and search bar.  After I typed in a few random numbers, SupplyFrame informed me, “Your search did not match any part details in the SupplyFrame data warehouse.  Extended search results are provided from the SupplyFrame custom search with our partner Google.”  Well, it’s good to know that Mountain View’s involved.

VentureBeat played with the site for a longer period of time, and “noted a few bugs on SupplyFrame.  After initially being able to search through on results, we were hit by error pages on later tries.”

Still, $7 million will go a long way towards squashing a few bugs.  SupplyFrame appears to be doing a solid job of filling a search niche.

Google, Yahoo Enhance Real Estate Offerings

Search is evolving. The scope is shifting from the horizontal, all-in-one informational resource to the vertical, everything you ever wanted to know about one topic destination. People aren’t merely looking for information anymore; they want specificity.

With that being said, no one would find it too surprising that sites like Yahoo Finance and Google Maps have become so widely successful. It’s these niche sites that represent the future of information gathering.

Keeping that concept in mind, both Google and Yahoo are constantly working to develop real estate search functions designed to cater to everyone from the first-time homebuyer to the licensed professional.

In the Official Google Blog, Ethan Russel talks about the company’s latest real estate offering:

If you’re a real estate professional, making your listings searchable on Google is simple and completely free. We don’t charge for photos or offer "featured listings." We believe that buyers just want to see the home that fits them best and that providers shouldn’t have to pay to show it to them.

We don’t sell houses, deal with agents’ compensation, or charge for leads. Our business is helping people find the information they’re looking for—when you have it, we send them directly to you.

Click for Full Size Image

Yahoo isn’t any slouch in the real estate game either. Recently, the popular Internet destination added to its existing service by launching its Foreclosure Center, a feature that lets users search for properties that have recently undergone foreclosure – potentially saving them upwards of 30% in the process.

How long will it be before partnerships between the major search engines and real estate professionals not only become necessary, but commonplace?

How do you gauge the validity of health information in search results? How do you find out what the standard of care is for your particular ailment? In a recent blog post, Google VP Adam Bosworth attempts to tackle these questions and more concerning health-related search – a vertical that finds itself in great demand from searchers these days.

Google already has methods for labeling reliable health-related links within its search results, but as Bosworth writes, the process isn’t really doing all that much to help searchers:

Unfortunately, many of you either don’t notice these words when you’re searching about health questions at Google or have no idea what they mean. Clearly, we can do better at making this kind of labeling noticeable and your ideas on how we could make it clear to you that a site is medically reliable or trustworthy would be greatly appreciated as we think this through.

As the need for relevant and specific health-related search results continues to rise, vertically based engines/portals like Healthline are springing up in an attempt to provider users with accurate and up-to-date information.

Google touts itself as the ultimate repository for all of the Internet’s information. As search has evolved, however, users are less concerned with the quantity of information at their disposal than retrieving as much relevant information about a singular topic or niche as possible, which is the reason that the inception of vertical search engines has become prevalent as of late.

As Bosworth notes here, Google is starting to recognize that it’s the delivery and presentation of information that matters most: 

At the end of the day, all these questions are about how you find the information you need. They are deceptively simple. If they were about restaurants, they would be trivial. But they are actually matters of life and death in the extreme and quality of life in the common case. In short, they matter profoundly.

This overture from Google leaves more questions and little answers, but at least invites community participation in the conversation.

A move like this could represent a shift in strategy for Microsoft, veering away from the broader scope of competing with the likes of Google and Yahoo for the entire search pie, but instead focusing on developing itself as a niche destination for users seeking more detailed results within specific verticals.

In the Microsoft’s statement regarding the acquisition, the company references a study by the Pew Internet & American Life project. According to the study’s findings, 8 million people in the United States go online for health information every day, and 53 percent of health-seekers said a recent search had an impact on how they take care of themselves or someone else.

The figure that Microsoft finds the most interesting, however, is that 22 percent of respondents said they felt frustrated by a lack of information or an inability to find what they were looking for when searching for health information. With the acquisition of Medstory, it’s clear that the boys in Redmond are looking to appeal to this ever growing search market.

“At Microsoft, we are focused on enabling people to make the best decisions,” said Peter Neupert, corporate vice president for health strategy and leader of the Health Solutions Group.

“We were impressed with the ability of Medstory’s unique technology to organize and surface the most relevant online health content, which empowers consumers who are trying to find the right information about an important life event.”

“Instead of trying to force people to think in terms of the way a computer searches, we’re enabling computers to more intuitively conduct searches in the way that people think,” said Dr. Alain Rappaport, M.D., Ph.D., CEO and founder of Medstory.

“With Microsoft’s global reach and experience, I look forward to this soon becoming a standard for online searches in health and medicine.”

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Wazap Coming To America?

Wazap is scheduled to launch in the United States in February.

Partech International heads up the second round of funding, with additional support from Wellington Partners. Wellington contributed $4 million in capital to Wazap in the company’s initial monetary campaign.

Vertical and niche searches are becoming all the rage, and with the video game industry ripe for takeoff in 2007, the timing for a U.S. launch of the gaming search engine couldn’t be better.

An ECP article comments on the conceptual approach that Wazap has taken:

Wazap’s success in the U.S. will probably come as more of a challenge, given the established presence of widely popular online gaming portals such as IGN, as well as others.

Of course, Wazap’s strategy may not be that of direct competition with IGN. In fact, searching for game titles within the engine may lead directly to articles hosted by the IGN portal. The nuance here is that Wazap is an aggregation resource, not a content provider in and of itself.

So instead of going to IGN to get a review of a game, then navigating over to GameFAQs to get a look at the walkthrough and cheats, users will instead be able to search for a particular game and get the entire lowdown within a SERP page, cutting down the research time.

Well, this is the concept that Wazap is banking on, anyway. It’ll be interested to see what kind of success and/or fanfare the U.S. launch is met with next month.

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Joe is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.

Take, for example, a Google search for [brittle bone disease]. Google does a nice job of bringing up alternative and supplemental results, and the first few results are quite relevant.

But note also a BBC article link from 2004, a badge of slightly dated information, which isn’t exactly what a medical researcher wants.

It’s a minor issue, but it demonstrates that there is room to improve both in timeliness and category. We’ve also learned recently that three-quarters of American Internet users (100 million adults) inherently trust the source they’ve found online, without taking the time to vet the information.

When I was in college, the Internet had just become a grand public experiment – Website directories were still in phonebook format then. Echoing what are now mainly the chief criticisms of Wikipedia, professors shunned any information that could only be found online. You didn’t really know where it came from.

And that risk is still there, even if to a lesser degree. The Internet is becoming, at least somewhat, self-correcting with the advent of user-generated media and search engines that can squirrel out subject-matter experts. But again, growth from here will be found in the gaps.

Do another search for [brittle bone disease] at Healthline.com. Like Google, except with more emphasis, Healthline provides the medical terminology Osteogenesis Imperfecta via its “Medically Speaking” function. Additionally, below that are four links to articles from content Healthline has licensed from leading medical publishers such as Thomson Gale and ADAM.

These sources receive a “trust mark” to indicate that the information checks out. Below those results, are Web results – well, not the whole Web. Healthline searches about 170,000 selected medical Websites.

“Originally (when it was YourDoctor.com), doctors created content for the Health Map,” said Healthline.com vice president of sales and marketing, Bill McGee. “It was originally a content site, but it was very expensive to maintain the staff of doctors and editors for that.”

And thus was born a medical search engine with verified information results. Healthline provides a pretty good case study for an examination of the potential for vertical search. But also, vertical search becomes a base for directly marketing to people with a stake in your product.

McGee says Healthline can’t create enough ad inventory for the pharmaceutical companies. Centers that offer body scans or diagnostic labs, he says are “willing to pay a bounty” to bring in customers. “Cost-per-call is going to be very big in a world where people would pay to connect with customers.”

But this vetted-source vertical search thing isn’t the end-all of potential. Imagine, to stay with a medical theme, a user-generated network in conjunction with this service where patients review and rate specific doctors, hospitals, clinics, et cetera.

Healthline doesn’t offer thisyetbut I think I may have given them an idea.

“With healthcare costs, indices are going to be more important,” said McGee. He continued my train of thought to a Web-destination that included prices of certain procedures.

On a side note, McGee says the price of a procedure isn’t always reflective of its quality. A hospital running a half-price bypass operation is usually one that has so much experience and business, it can afford to discount.

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews: