Wading through the Web

So many search results, so little time. This is a common frustration for many who search for information on the World Wide Web, and especially for those whose searches are specific to an industry or a topic.

Take, for example, a search for the word ‘title’ on popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, or MSN. The majority of the search results include sites for boxing equipment and associations, HTML document structure, vehicle registration and title information, online book titles, a few businesses with ‘Title’ in their names, and the Wikipedia definition for ‘title’ as the prefix or suffix of a person’s name.

What’s missing is a context for the search, such as real estate property title. Adding these three words resulted in—after some additional scrolling — a link to home infomax.com, an online repository of real property records in the United States.

Vertical search engines — also known as specialty search engines — narrow the scope of a search to information specific to a particular business, industry, or topic. A growing trend that helps Web users make the most of their time online, vertical search engines have already narrowed the search to a specific industry or topic — the context — where as traditional ‘horizontal’ search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, or even Ask.com produce results from a multitude of Web pages that may or may not be related to the context of the search.

Vertical search engines limit the results to a specific set of content directly related to the topic or industry of query, and most include results aggregated from multiple sites on the Internet.

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