Shopping, news & media, and entertainment sites receive nice chunks of traffic from Google. Measurement firm Hitwise said those verticals gather upwards of 14 percent of their upstream traffic from the big search engine.

Inside the health & medical and travel verticals, Google occupies a much bigger portion of the traffic seen on those sites. Hitwise found double digit percentage increases year over year in the Google traffic flowing in those directions.

Travel sites found 25.6 percent of visitors heading in from Google in July 2008. That represented a massive 23 percent increase from July 2007.

Health & medical sites found even greater numbers arriving via Google’s search machine. They picked up 31.4 percent of their traffic courtesy of Google, up 9 percent year over year.

The heavier percentage of traffic from Google likely reflects its ever-increasing share of the search engine market. In the US, Hitwise found Google closing in on 71 percent of the searches performed, while Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask all ceded share in July.

Affinity Labs is a start-up of Christopher Michel who in 2004 sold community site Military.com to Monster for $40 million. The Military.com community has since exploded in traffic and has been a phenomenal financial success for Monster according to all accounts. Christopher Michel has also partnered with Monster to sell advertising for the Affinity sites.

The sites reportedly receive about 800,000 visitors per month combined.

The sites as listed by Monster are:

– PoliceLink: www.policelink.com

– FireLink: www.firelink.com

– GovCentral: www.govcentral.com

– NursingLink: www.nursinglink.com

– ArtBistro: www.artbistro.com

– TechCommunity: www.techcommunity.com

– TheApple: www.theapple.com

This makes Alan Meckler’s July purchase of vertical jobs oriented community site mediabistro.com for $20 million cash and a $3 million earn-out a significant bargain. Unlike Affinity Labs, Mediabistro is an established web business that was founded in 1997 and had estimated annual revenue of $5-6 million. Affinity’s revenue is likely much less and has a business history of only about one year.

Obviously Monster is relying on it inner knowledge of Affinity and its very positive history with the founder.

Vertical communities continue to be red hot acquisition targets!

Over 44 percent of traffic to health & medical sites arrived after a visitor found those destinations in a search engine. One in three visitors to travel sites originated from a search as well.

Analysis firm Hitwise tabulated the percentage of searchers hitting various industries post-query. Visitors to the shopping & classified (25.7%), entertainment (22.7%), and news & media (21.8%) categories popped into a search engine first in respectable numbers.

Just for the fun of it, Hitwise also broke down the percentages of traffic Google drove to these categories by itself in November:

Advertisers in these categories should take note, as people with interests that coincide with an industry and a marketer’s message could really move the meter for an ad campaign.

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SES Chicago: Soaring Through Universal Search

SES Chicago returns, and WebProNews is on hand to bring you reports and videos from the Windy City. Enjoy our coverage this week.

Universal search. Blended search. Vertical search. They all aim at one target: fulfilling visitors’ needs so that they keep coming back.

The speakers at the SES Chicago Orion Panel: Universal, Blended and Vertical Search, noted the need to fulfill the value proposition of search for visitors. Individual search intensity drives that need, with the average American performing 74 searches a month.

As the search engines become more creative with how they present results in the various approaches of universal, blended, and vertical search, opportunities arise for search engine marketers. SEMs have to be more creative to thrive with the options being presented to searchers.

The proof will be in the pudding, or at least the success rates. SEMs who use this ‘paid real estate’ well should enjoy better results than the competition.

Search engines will drive that success too. The essential search experience presents someone with a list of blue links. It’s a far cry from the typical social networking experience, which has indirectly nudged the search industry with its universal results.

Google has found its users like universal search, and the way results pull from multiple sources of relevant results. Microsoft’s work on improving relevance and blending results from other content has people spending more time on their pages.

Ask.com presents as much information as it can with its revamped, Ask 3D approach. Coupled with major spending by IAC on advertising, Ask has been able to hold its ground, even as Yahoo and Microsoft cede search market share to Google.

"In the next 5 to 10 years, search and browsing will be the same thing," Brad Goldberg from Microsoft told attendees. Jim Müller from Google said the universal search experience will become richer.

"Over time, those other search engines are going to be merged into Google and other search engines. Users want to go to a single search engine and have a query and then that stuff (like Google Maps) come up," he said.

The search experience isn’t tipping in a particular direction it seems; instead, it’s standing up vertically more and more, nice and straight.

WebProNews Internet reporter/anchor Kara Ratliff contributed to this report.

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Healthcare verticals hold a lot of promise for people seeking medical information. New startups like TauMed and Kosmix compete with tech heavyweight Microsoft’s HealthVault, while sites provided by the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic tap their resources for the public good.

Resource Shelf noted the arrival of PDRHealth.com, an outpost of Thomson Healthcare’s Physicians’ Desk Reference. Accessing the online database of the Reference generally requires a doctor to subscribe.

The value of the information available in that database now comes to the regular Internet visitor. People can sign up to receive electronic newsletters, alerts on new clinical trials, and new information about prescription drugs.

PDRHealth provides details about drugs and supplements, such as their interactions and side effects. They have indexed information on diseases and conditions, with data on the diagnosis and treatment of those.

Thomson also plans to add more health research tools to PDRHealth. The site launched with tools to help check cholesterol risks, and to find potential treatment options for conditions.

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Their Live Search blog stated previously that the company would show off expanded results for computers and electronics equipment. Other categories will get this treatment, but for now electronics reigns at Live Search.

Product reviews will be the key to the Live Search vertical strategy with electronics. Search result pages at the Live Search site brings together product information, most-discussed aspects of a product, and the percentage of positive and negative comments made about an item.

These snapshots include user review information, represented graphically. In Live Search’s printer example, one can view all of the general comments made about the printer, or look at comments concerning price, print quality, and other topics.

Though Live Search is a general search site, there are plenty of those in the marketplace. Vertical information placement like what Microsoft wants to do with electronics gives their engine something to differentiate it from market leader Google.

The key will be in how well Microsoft can monetize these verticals. Electronics companies are highly competitive, and consumers love their products especially for holiday gifting. It seems like a rich mine to tap for Live Search.

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The Live Search blog described two new changes to product search. In one, queries for product categories now return popular products within the category.

Computers and electronics will have the most noticeable results for this type of product category result first, but Microsoft will expand this to other categories over time.

Another new feature accents the additional information available when searching for a specific product. A quick summary of the product, plus a graphic of user opinions, will appear for these items. Like the product category search, this one also leans heavily on computer and electronics queries.

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."

Late on Friday afternoon is a brilliant time for Google to announce a major change with their news service if they do not want people to talk about much. With their AP, Agence France-Presse, The Press Association in the United Kingdom and The Canadian Press syndication deals, Google claims they are improving duplicate detection, increasing listing variety, and as a net result they are sending MORE traffic to the people they signed syndication deals with.

Danny stated:

Google’s going beyond just hosted news articles as part of this release. The company also says it will be doing a better job of duplicate detection overall, so that if there’s the same article from wire agencies it doesn’t have agreements with, such as Reuters, it should be more likely to point to the Reuters site than someone running Reuters material.

Google’s market position allows them to address relevancy issues as needed, in order to suit their business agendas. They were lax on duplicate news content for nearly a decade because they wanted to spread their public relations spin through the media and get ad deals with many of the media outlets. After Google secured their CNN partnership, now it is time to solve the news syndication duplicate content problem and send traffic to the international news agencies.

A year or two down the road Google News will likely shift from temporarily archiving news to permanently doing so, and news will be yet another content vertical they own, along with search, ads, analytics, video, and books.

Look mom, newspaper ad revenue shrunk 8.6% year on year and Google is getting those ad dollars. With improved duplicate content filters you can look for those numbers to fall further. I wonder if this is the end of Google’s successful public relations campaigns in the mainstream media.

They use coersion to control traffic, and then sell it to you as a feature you wanted. Those guys are soooo good at business!

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