Monday, March 05, 2007
Search Engines Go Vertical
Silicon Valley and San Francisco are returning to their former glories as the places to be to launch a search startup. There's still VC to be had, and lots of talented engineers and designers available. Niche search engines have more modest goals in trying to do one thing better than Google and Yahoo.
There is plenty of opportunity to improve search, and exclusion rather than inclusion could be the quickest path to improving the quality of results. Since everyone who can type has some sort of web presence, it is even more challenging to find quality information from reputable sources.
I'd like to see vertical search engines that restrict the web to "trusted" resources only as a way to consistently provide the best answers. For example, a search engine could limit results to the best mainstream and alternative information sources and track individuals' search habits to customize the results. If you care about cars, a search engine could pick the top 200 vehicle websites and blogs, because the odds are you'd find just about everything you'd want their.
Individuals could choose to block or add individual domains as their needs dictate. Don't want academic research (.edu) domains, or only care about information from North America? No problem. If a user consistently chooses results from a handful of publishers, then push those sites up to the top of the rankings. If you care about search marketing you could probably build a list of 25 sites that would cover 90 percent of everything you need from search.
While search engines are amazingly fast, narrowing the search universe and creating "do it yourself" engines could greatly increase the quality of results.
By John Gartner at 10:28 AM | Comments (0)
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