• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, November 28, 2006

Vertical Search  Stands Up to Be Counted

We're all search engines now.

Google and Yahoo have made their case; the search box is the de facto interface for the digital age. Consumers and publishers are comfortable with this simple front-end for information retrieval, so we can expect the search box to go way off the GYM (Google-Yahoo-MSN) reservation this year. And consumers will expect more precise and usable results from all providers.

Indeed, the search failure rate among business users of the major search engines is 31.9 percent, which indicates that one-third of queries produce unsatisfactory results, according to Outsell, a consultancy that studies content businesses.

"This is the window for vertical search," says Chuck Richard, vice president and lead analyst at Outsell. Whether it's B2B verticals like GlobalSpec for engineering or consumer sites like Kayak, the field is wide open for more targeted, precise results. Consumers are ready for novel specialty engines like Farecast.com, which even predicts upcoming changes in airline fares.

Adding value to search, rather than merely piling up the hits, is the next step. Google's "Custom Search Engine" leads the trend by offering publishers tools for crafting their own vertical search off the Google engine, along with a share in the revenue. The thinking is that if consumers pursue more relevant experiences, so will advertising budgets.

"Vertical search solves a lot of problems when it comes to targeting," says Fredrick Marckini, CEO of iProspect. "Imagine the power of targeting within a vertical - of advertising to women searching on WebMD, or serving ads to teenagers on game searches. Now that is a killer app."

Local search will continue to be pretty killer, as search applications come. By 2010, local queries and geotargeted e-mail will represent 50 percent of online ad spending, predicts Borrell Associates. And this leading growth area for search is not just a windfall for GYM.

"The third parties are starting to happen," says Greg Sterling, founder and principal, Sterling Market Intelligence. Verizon SuperPages and YellowPages are asserting their brands, beefing up their salesforces, and along with regional upstarts like R.H. Donnelley's DexOnline, are claiming a sizable local search market share. SuperPages grabs nearly as many yellow pages searches as market leader Yahoo. And YellowPages ties Google in local search, according to comScore.

Even better news for local search is the rise of new wireless verticals. "Mobile search will be the biggest search trend of 2007," says Kevin Langer, associate media director for SMG Search. The major carriers are starting to place their bets on various ad-supported search providers this year, and almost half of mobile users say they expect to be using them at least once a week. "[It] revolutionizes how users find local businesses," Langer says. Sooner than they expect, advertisers will be scrambling to tweak creative for handsets and to build mobile landing pages. "Mobile is a no-brainer," says Stuart Larkin, vice president of search marketing at Performics.

Ironically, the category generating the most hype and investment this year was video; it's also the least focused vertical when it comes to online search. Google's gobble of YouTube was emblematic of a land grab for video clips that has more to do with building content silos than applying to video content the text search paradigm that Google itself perfected.

While some players like Blinkx and ClipBlast are moving in the right direction, the market awaits a breakthrough search engine brand that actually finds that Dexter episode or the funny ad you glanced at last night no matter which vault hosts it.