Vertical Search Remains Hot

by Brian Smith, on April 19th, 2006

While I’m trying to keep ComparisonEngines focused on shopping search, I think it’s important to keep you up to speed on other verticals like job search and travel search.

-SimplyHired announced a $13.5m investment led by Fox Interactive Media (FIM) and Foundation Capital. This is a continuation of a trend in which old school media companies are investing in high growth vertical search engines. NYTimes and Indeed. Scripps and Shopzilla. IAC and Pronto.

-While most reporters picked up on all the bells and whistles that came with FareChase’s official launch, what’s more important is that FareChase results are now integrated into Yahoo! search results. This is a big step forward for travel search.

If you’re interested in vertical search, make sure to check out VerticalSearch.net, where I cover job search and travel search.

Tags: Comparison Engines


Barry Smith said

Hi Brian.
I got your link fom your recent posting to SearchEngineWatch.
It’s certainly a hot space at the moment.
The key for this sort of integration work is speed and comprehensivity. Going form search-engine response times to standard “travel search” response times is going to be a big turn off for some users.
However, having said that, I feel that there are going to be some big movements in Travel in the next couple of months. It’s definitely a Watch this Space vertical.
Best wishes in your new role.
Kind Regards
Barry

April 19th, 2006 at 2:22 pm |

Stuart Meyler said

One thing that remains as yet unresolved for the vertical search engines is their parasitic nature. Jakob Nielsen raised this issue with search overall, which, IMHO, was an over reach but in the case of vertical, there is some legitimacy.

The business model of most vertical search engines is based on arbitrage and not much else. Arbitrage is OK, but if I am a travel/real estate/jobs/automotive site I am not sure I would want to fund my own demise. The natural extension of the vertical model is “direct connect”, cutting out the very people supplying the content today. Why crawl Monster, when I can provide a feed for employers directly? More importantly, why would an employeer pay Monster since it is, essentially, a paid inclusion search engine for jobs, if there is a free alternative?

April 21st, 2006 at 8:38 am |

Jeff Tokarz said

Stuart, your assessment about the parasitic nature of vertical search engines is dead on! The major job boards, like old-line media companies, must adopt the changes before them or face decreasing market share, etc. The relationship between vertical job search engines, i.e., Just-Posted.com, SimplyHired.com, Indeed.com, etc., need not be parasitic.

Jeff Tokarz
Founder & CEO
Just-Posted Inc.

May 11th, 2006 at 7:03 am |