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Jupiters Vertical Search Prediction Flawed says Evslin

Thread Title:
There Won’t be Vertical Search Engines!
Thread Url:
http://blog.tomevslin.com/2005/02/there_wont_be_v.html
Thread Description:
Tom Evslin says that Jupiters prediction that Search will go the same way as TV did (from several major channels to 100's of specialized ones) and go Vertical is flawed. More to the point, it won't happen.

Wrong! The analogy is broken:
Each TV channel can only offer 24 hours of content per day. Obviously, more content requires more channels. The power of today’s search engine is that they offer the whole web and their reach grows as the web grows. We don’t need more search engines to cover more content the way we needed more channels.
Because they can only broadcast one show at a time, “mainstream” channels avoid exotica. The web doesn’t suffer from bandwidth limitation. Exotica, minutia, trivia, and fascinating detail unheard of on any TV channel are as available as “mainstream” information through any search engine searching the whole web.

There is much more on this on Tom's post, so do check it out. I think you'll find it a hard argument to refute...
Related: Search business mirroring TV industry?

- Y! MyWeb

Vertical is Useful

Play around with Gigablast's Custom Topic Search it's pretty good and anyone can make a verticle search engine for free. The point being that people will find verticle engines useful for many topics, but can they thrive on a commercial level and will they become the norm may not be in the casrds for the forseeable future. But you will see more of them.

By Brad at Feb 26 2005 - 12:32

Vertical is very useful.

There is a high demand for vertical search in the B2B community and the current proof is it does serve the advertisers. The vertical slice must be strike the balance of being all encompassing for that vertical slice but not overly so.

Isn't local search a vertical slice of information. I think an overall condemnation of vertical search shows a blinkered view.

By eurotrash at Feb 26 2005 - 13:38

Vertical search or no vertical search?

RSS-aggregator mainstays Fred Wilson and Tom Evslin have put forward very different opinions on the future of vertical search. To sum quickly (but read their posts for yourself), Evslin believes there won't be a vertical search, because v-search limit...

By Trackback: www.yardley.ca (not verified) at Feb 28 2005 - 00:42

Response

Niki Scevak responds here

Quote:
There is one very clear point I want to make. In no way are we saying that vertical search engines will replace broad based ones. Rather, we are saying that the search experience is currently incomplete and that a vertical layer is being applied on top of the current one. This is particular true of generic keywords on search engines like Google and Yahoo, where vertical search has the most value to add. New ventures are launching to satisfy this demand because categories within search (retail and travel are the best examples) are reaching a certain scale of advertising dollars.

Tom may choose not to use vertical search engines but many others are. 2.5m visited Sidestep in January, triple the number from the same period a year ago, according to comScore. The Shopping search engines like Shopzilla and Shopping.com are up 50% compared to a year ago off a much larger base (15-20m). Tom's assertation that people won't use them is weak. He could argue that it will be restricted to a minority but he doesn't.

Google and Yahoo themselves are focusing product development on vertical search engines (Froogle and Yahoo comparison shopping, Yahoo acquiring Farechase).

By Nick W at Mar 1 2005 - 18:28

Evslin's response

Evslin has much to say in response to Scevak and others' comments on the post we highlighted above, among them, this:

Quote:
Fred says he would use Kayak to make reservations, not Google. I agree that Google is not the best place to make a plane reservation. But I wouldn’t classify Kayak as a vertical search engine. It is a provider of specific set of services with a structured database. Kayak doesn’t crawl the web to find seats on planes; it uses feeds directly or indirectly from airlines. Similarly, a job-finding site’s technical value lies in the fact that it aggregates structured data and provides a structured interface for finding the right candidate or the right job – it obviously has a community value as well.

By Nick W at Mar 4 2005 - 16:42