I am speaking at Search Engine Strategies Chicago this year. The session I am participating in is “Getting Vertical Search Right”.
Being directly involved in the travel industry, I will have a different opinion on vertical search than many of my co-speakers. I do not see the sense of urgency and immediate need for vertical search engines. I will touch on many different topics during my 15 minutes, below is a taste.
Saturation and Competition
It is not to say that vertical search engines do not work now for many companies. However, there is not a huge demand for vertical search engines in the travel industry and other major verticals because of the competition that exist already. Many industries have 100’s of sites that already handle reviews, pricing and product comparison. Adding more to the mix, with limited inventory, will ultimately confuse the consumer.
These new vertical search engines will only have an impact on smaller industries. However, once that space is filled, then need does not exist anymore. Having multiple search engines in every industry defeats the purpose having a vertical search to begin with. The saturation will eventually send users back to where they were to begin with … Google.
For example, a site like Snooth.com may work well now because it brings users to a specialized search on wine. However, what happens when the next wine vertical search engine comes along? Then, the next? The market becomes flooded with wine verticals. The confusion will ultimately bring the user back to Google. Then, it leads to - “Why add the middle man at all?”
A vertical search engine will never be a complete result. Sites like Snooth.com, for example, will never have a complete list of wine. Because of lack of products a vertical search will eventually lead to mistrust from the consumer. Google is successful because of its exhaustive list of results, not despite it.
Advertising
Smart advertisers are going to fulfill the demand in “”Horizontal Search Engines” first, because that’s where consumers will turn to first. With marketing dollars shrinking every day, there will not be available funds to support the other sites.
Find out more information, by attending Search Engine Strategies Chicago.
Tags: SES, Speaking, vertical search
December 21st, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Interesting points you raise. I’ll start by saying that I run a modest vertical search engine for professional wine information (a bit different from Snooth, which really isn’t a search engine at all, in the traditional sense, but a site for wine recommendations and shopping).
First, I doubt that there will ever be many “vertical search engines” for wine, because of the limited market, but in any case I disagree that a proliferation of such search engines will drive people to Google. I would expect the opposite. Each one of these search engines is trying to gain traffic by creating loads of SEO pages for Google, many of them not particularly useful (e.g. content-free landing pages which say simply “be the first to rate this wine.”) As these pages proliferate, and as wine retailers and other commercial wine sites also become more savvy about SEO, Google’s results become increasingly cluttered, driving people to the higher-precision experience of vertical search engines. You are right, Google’s success is because of its enormous recall, and lack of recall is the Achilles’ Heel of vertical search engines, so there will still be some “tail queries” where Google will always do better. (I think when you said “precision is the problem” you really meant “recall is the problem!”) But if a vertical search can do better on average than Google for a specific type of query, I think (hope!) that users needing good results for those queries will learn to start at the vertical search engine and then head to Google if they don’t find what they want. Successful vertical search engines will also have to find other ways of differentiating the user experience, by creating features not available on Google, and tailoring their UI to the specific needs of their community, and most importantly, by creating a community around their product.
December 21st, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Doug,
Thanks for the comments.
I will check out your site. It looks very promising.
I believe part of the problem is, and you probably agree, that there are many, really bad sites out there. Many of those are claiming to be “search engines”, and we know they are not.
One of my points at SES Chicago was the definition of “organic”. Many of these “search engines” claim to have free, organic listings. Organic does not involve companies creating data feeds and submitting their products to be listed. Organic is doing nothing (except for possibly some SEO).
Because these sites are not organic, they will never truly be a complete listing. And because they are not complete listings, users can not trust the results. Which ultimately brings them back to Google to get the compete listing.
Thanks again for the comments.