• by joe.h , Bob Heyman , August 18, 2006

Last month's column on new developments in vertical search sparked lots of response, with readers pointing me to other news in this space. These include companies in the following categories:

IT Search

Krugle has as its vision to "answer the need for a single place to find relevant code and critical technical information." The company claims that developers spend 20 to 25 percent of their time looking for code and technical information. Unlike Google or Yahoo, Krugle crawls source code, whether in open repositories or within source code control systems.

Consumer Electronics

Retrevo helps buyers and owners of high- tech gadgets and gear find relevant answers to everyday questions. The Silicon Valley startup launches Aug. 21. The site uses two AI techniques called clustering and classification, commonly employed in pattern recognition applications.

Shopping

Shopping Comparison sites like Shopping.com and Pricegrabber.com are essentially vertical search engines. Mpire.com is a newcomer to the space that allows users to view the most recent selling prices of millions of items (using data from eBay) and then compare those prices with similar items selling on Overstock.com, eBay, Craigslist and Amazon. Mpire can also show a graph of prices over a 30-day time period, and plans to add social networking features such as allowing users to submit product reviews or send items to friends.

Music

Pandora describes itself as "a music discovery service designed to help you find and enjoy music that you will love." Its database includes 400,000 songs by 20,000 artists. Pandora is powered by the Music Genome Project, which has comprehensively analyzed the musical characteristics in its collection and serves up music that is similar to what you tell the service you already like. Once Pandora knows your favorite songs or artists, it launches a streaming station to "explore that part of the musical universe." But don't look for any classical music--the Music Genome Project doesn't include any yet.

Real Estate

Trulia, a residential real estate search engine, has announced the release of TruliaMap, an Internet tool available free to real estate brokers and agents that allows them to showcase their listings through mapping technology that automatically maps up to 50 property listings on a Web site. Since rolling out the feature, Trulia reports that usage of online maps from click-through to listings has increased more than 400 percent.

Next month we'll take a look at developments in local search.