Google 'One Box' Search

Google has improved its search appliance, bringing the concept of "OneBox" search to web searches. This, along with recent partner additions help to make it's products more attractive to large businesses by creating widgets and plug-ins to enhance the functionality of their vertical search categories.

Most Industrial Firms to Increase Ad Spend

A survey in B2B Online finds that 569% of industrial marketers plan on increasing their marketing spend this year. Only 7% plan on decreasing their spend, with the remaining percentage to stay about the same as last year.

More than half of marketers plan to allocate additional budget dollars to search engine marketing, online directories and Web sites, and e-mail advertising.

http://www.btobonline.com/article.cms?articleId=27722

Vertical for Television

Thoughtworthy Media announced the launch of a new online vertical search engine for televised product placement, music, spot advertising, and all other TV merchandising relationships. They will use the slogan "Watch. Click. Buy."

Thoughtworthy’s thought process with this search engine is “if a viewer can see it or hear it on TV, ThoughtWorthy Media’s new search engine enables that viewer to seamlessly identify, learn more, buy, and even criticize it online at www.thoughtworthy.com.”

The Local Market

According the Boston's Yankee Group, more than 30% of businesses with 20 to 99 employees and 40% of those with 2 to 19 employees were using local search engine advertising.

BusinessWeek referenced this in a recent article titled "Search That Works" http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_12/b3976463.htm

Profiled is a San Francisco based business called Absolute Adventures and it's use of geotargeted advertising:

In August, 2004, [Absolute Adventures’ CEO Carissa] Zenorini signed up for Yahoo! Local Sponsored Search, which lets you target ads to a specific state, city, or even neighborhood. Now her ad pops up only when someone within 75 miles of San Francisco searches using the keywords she has chosen. She pays 10 cents to 99 cents per click, spending a total of about $3,000 a year. The local approach is working. Absolute Adventure’s revenues doubled, to $400,000, in the 12 months ended in August, 2005. “Online advertising is the single most important contributing factor to our success,” says Zenorini. “We ask every client how they found us, and apart from repeat business, about 97% found us online.”

TrueLocal - Neighborhood Search

Toronto based TrueLocal www.truelocal.com intends to be the search engine of choice for local search. The search differs from Google and Yahoo in that they start with local information on businesses, such as telephone and physical addresses, then they crawl the web looking for references to those local shops.

This search application can be of great use to people and businesses that relocate.

Google Travel?

Is Google building a travel vertical? The position is in Chicago, perhaps this is co-built with Orbitz.

Five Reasons to Use an Ad Network

ValueClick Media's general manager, David Yovanno shares ways to use ad networks to drive brand marketing results in a recent iMediaConnection article. According to David, these are:

1. Complement your reach (mix portals and verticals)

2. Reduce frequency waste

3. Optimize to brand metrics

4. Scale your custom solutions

5. Leverage efficiencies (working with an established ad network will significantly free their time up to focus on getting the most from their portal and top vertical content site strategies as part of a balanced media mix.)

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/9096.asp

Google Base Gaining Users

Local advertisers and vertical sites are posting ads on Google base. Google base is a free structured data entry system designed to challenge online classifieds.

According to many testimonials on this ClickZ article http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3598386 , these ads have been performing better than some of the established vertical players.

Microsoft to Launch Academic Search

Microsoft announced the pending launch of Window's Live Academic Search. Also, they said they plan on launching Live Product Search to go head to head with Googles Froogle potentially. A Microsoft spokeswoman said only that "this is a vertical search area we're certainly interested in, and are working on. We'll have more to say at a later date."

http://www.crn.com/sections/microsoft/microsoft.jhtml?articleId=185300518

Yahoo! China

Yahoo! China announced they will launch a series of vertical search services including: movie search, shopping search and tourism search.

http://chinastockblog.com/article/8947

Online Job Community for the Search Engine Industry

Oaseo.com launced in beta as on online job community for search engine industry professionals and employers. The site currently features vertical job search for openings in the search marketing industry spidered via a variety of job content providers in the US.

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/4/prweb370075.htm

Changes at Search Engine Watch

The growth of Vertical Search has prompted SEW to give more attention by dedicating correspondent Brian Smith as a dedicated resource.

http://searchenginewatch.com/

Google Real Estate

Google has added real estate listings to it's local mapping service.

Visitors to google.com who search for the terms ''apartment rental" or ''homes for sale" are asked to type in a location. Results are then displayed with red push pins on a Google map.

Tony Longo, the founder of Condodomain.com, which carries listings of Boston's most luxurious condominium projects, said his firm submits listings on behalf of clients to Google, which he said quietly rolled out the service weeks ago. Google, like Trulio.com, Propsmart.com, and his site, is a ''vertical search" provider that compiles listings from various sources.

Firms Told to Look Beyond Google

Online marketing agency Harvest Digital reported that nearly half of all internet users spend a third of their time spent online searching, and 43 percent of users are likely to click on links because they are on the first page of results.

The report predicted that vertical search services, based around individual industries such as travel or supermarkets, will become increasingly important.

http://www.harvestdigital.com/

Google Health Vertical

Long a rumor, now seems to be more of a reality. Google appears to have a project named "Google Health" which will build out specialized vertical search solutions for health and medical searches -similar to how they currently handle other vertical searches.

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060331-092946

Career Advice Vertical

The first vertical search engine for career advice, CHiMBY, just launched.

From their site: CHiMBY is a vertical search engine that indexes career advice information within a small but highly respected network of authors, bloggers and career media sources in order to provide the best answers to your career advice questions. Each source is hand-picked to ensure fresh, relevant results. The information you will find comes from an exclusive club of career advice experts.

www.chimby.com

WSJ Reviews the Crowded Health Vertical

The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday examined how searching for medical information on the Internet "is starting to get easier" as a "range of Internet companies ... are launching tailored search engines that aim to deliver patients and their families more relevant health-related content online."
Specific sites mentioned included Kosmix.com, WebMD.com, Google (which is developing a healch search), Healthline Network, Mamma.com and MedStory.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114290098402203556-search.html?

Photography Goes Vertical

A new search engine dubbed "NikoScope" has been quietly weathering beta-tests with the help of the 40,000-member Nikonians online community, which has been gathering news, articles, reviews, and lively forum discussions for the past six years.

NikoScope manually selects the sites they spider, not just letting anyone get listed. Instead of getting over 10,000 or more results on a search for a specific camera, you will get significantly less, maybe only a 100 results. They hope the difference is those results are more likely to have relevant information about that camera, not just mere mentions of it.

www.nikoscope.com

uSwitch Acquired by E.W. Scripps

The E.W. Scripps Co. has expanded its online footprint with a $366 million acquisition of U.K. vertical search site uSwitch.

Consumers can use the comparison shopping engine to compare rates and sign up with providers of gas, electricity, home phone, digital television, broadband, credit cards, and secured and unsecured personal loans.

USwitch is most similar to the LowerMyBills.com service in the U.S., which was acquired by Experian Interactive last year for $380 million.

http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3592111

Plastics Industry Vertical

IDES Inc. announced today the launch of their vertical search engine for the plastics industry. In one search, IDES gives users free access to articles, technical documents and websites. The vertical search engine developed by IDES only crawls and indexes plastics-related websites, providing plastics industry professionals with specialized content.
www.ides.com

Homestore Moving to Vertical Search

Online real estate site Homestore is changing its name to Move Inc. and will launch a vertical search property at Move.com that will offer a variety of advertising products.
The name change and plans for Move.com are part of a series of strategic changes for the company, which is positioning itself to compete with Zillow and RealEstateAdvisor in the space.

Though Homestore has plans to revamp content and advertising offerings on a variety of its properties, the most dramatic change is in its vertical search plans.
"The underlying strategy for this new site is to give consumers access to the most comprehensive selection of resale, new home and rental listings possible," said Allan Merrill, executive vice president of the company.

Rather than simply indexing properties that pay to be included, as it has done thus far, the company will opt for comprehensiveness with the new offering. Listings will come in part from its existing Homestore.com, HomeBuilder.com and RENTNET properties, which will re-direct to Move.com when the site launches in the second quarter of this year. The company will also crawl the Web, take feeds from property owners and accept free listings via a self-service Web interface.

http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3586941

Vertical Search for Classifieds

The first classifieds vertical search service - Vast.com recently launched. Vast is a vertical search engine for classifieds founded by Naval Ravikant, formally the CEO of Epinions.

Currently, Vast has categories including Cars, Jobs and People.

www.vast.com

Local Paid Search to Approach $1 Billion in 2006

Borrell Associates is reporting that local advertisers have begun to spend larger amounts on paid search advertising. According to their latest report "Local Advertisers Plowing $1 Billion Into Search", smaller local businesses are doubling their expenditures this year, up from $420 million in 2005.

The report includes spending estimates for 210 cities.

A copy of the full report is at http://www.borrellassociates.com, via the "Reports" tab.

TechSearch.com

CMP Media announced the launch of a new vertical for the tech sector titled TechSearch.com

TechSearch.com's site indexes more than 60 technology news Web sites, blogs and publications both inside and outside of CMP.

http://www.btobonline.com/article.cms?articleId=27283

Computer Programming Vertical

A new programming search engine named CompWisdom launched hoping to provide useful and meaningful results, which are relevant to the topic of computing, programming and the Internet.

www.compwisdom.com

Beer Search

Now this is niche.

Beer.Chicago.com recently launched, providing users information on hundreds of local bars including drink specials and hours for most establishments. Further, they integrated Google maps to enhance user experience.