A bit of new jargon, "vertical creep," is beginning to, well, creep into the lexicon of online marketers.
The concept--discussed at length at Search Engine Strategies in New York
Monday--refers to the relatively new phenomenon of Web search engines returning results considered "vertical" on top of the organic results. By displaying vertical results, search engines are hoping
to answer the specific question users actually have in mind, rather than providing information relevant to keywords.
"Vertical search results deliver the answer in the result itself," Mihir Shah,
Yahoo director of product management, explained at the conference.
For instance, the results page for a Yahoo search for "digital cameras" contains a Yahoo "shortcut" at the top of the results
page, higher than the organic listings but below the sponsored links. That shortcut offers links to four brands of digital cameras, on the assumption that consumers searching for digital cameras want
to purchase them, as opposed to, say, read about the technology behind such cameras.
On MSN, the digital camera search yields a link to MSN's shopping section, with the brand names and prices of
the three most popular cameras displayed; as with Yahoo, those results appear underneath the sponsored links and above the organic results.
Google, as well, incorporates vertical listings in its
Web search results. When users type "digital camera" into Google, the results page shows a Froogle product search link at the top of the page, directly underneath the sponsored results, as well as
links to three Canon cameras and pricing information from camera store B&H.
Vertical creep, for want of a better term, exists far beyond shopping links. Other information to appear in that space
between the sponsored results and first organic results includes links to maps and top news stories, to name a few.
It's not surprising that search engines are continually trying to improve the
way they organize and present information to users. What's far more remarkable is that, as the term creep implies, the phenomenon developed as gradually and subtly as it did--especially in a field as
closely watched as search.