An Autobytel survey reveals consumers' desire for fewer, more relevant results generated by vertical search engines.

Last month while I was doing some online holiday shopping, one of the retail sites I was on began to slow down, probably due to heavy traffic. All told, my shopping experience took about five minutes longer than it would have on a typical day, but I found myself grumbling about the hold-up… at least for a few seconds, until I realized how absurd it was to get upset about the "inconvenience" of doing my holiday shopping at 11:00 at night at my dining room table -- something that would have been inconceivable eight to 10 years ago.

This is a good example of how quickly we're taking revolutionary, life-changing technological conveniences for granted, particularly online. And that includes arguably the most revolutionary and life-changing online tools -- search engines. They may be the "engines" that make the internet run -- not to mention the most democratic and powerful way to connect people to huge stores of information ever devised by mankind -- and yet nearly three out of four (72 percent) Americans report experiencing a degree of "search engine fatigue" (i.e., they're regularly becoming frustrated during searches) and wishing they had a more comprehensive and quick way to find the information they're looking for online.

This was among the key findings of a survey of 1,001 representative U.S. internet users jointly conducted by Kelton Research and Autobytel Inc. last summer. The frustration was even more pronounced among 18- to 34-year-olds, with 23 percent of these younger internet users saying they "always" or "usually" experience search engine fatigue.

Getting beyond the top-line results of the survey, consider this: 64.5 percent of survey-takers say they've spent more than two hours in a single sitting searching for information on search engines; 37 percent have spent three-plus hours and nearly 5 percent have spent seven or more hours -- more or less a full day of work -- searching for information on the internet in a single sitting. So, it should come as no surprise that 75 percent of those who experience search engine fatigue report that they walk away from their computers without the information they were originally looking for either "always," "usually" or "sometimes."

So what's going on here? Is it simply that people are so spoiled by the incredible convenience of search technology that they expect to find exactly what they're looking for in seconds, as if they were using a computer aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise, or are the big search engines actually beginning to sputter?

The answer is probably a little of both.

The search engines themselves are actually evolving at a breakneck pace. The problem is that their job is becoming exponentially more difficult all the time. In 2000, for example, Google had 1.5 billion web pages in its index. By 2006, that number had mushroomed to over 25 billion. And there's no sign of slowing, with 12.8 billion new sites hitting the web during the first five months of '07 alone.

The result is that common, seemingly reasonable queries like "New York hotels" are producing millions of results, creating avalanches of information for consumers to dig their way through -- one site at a time.

The other side of the coin is a diminishment of the value of search ads, which in many cases, become like needles in a haystack. (Another survey finding is that most people don't scroll beyond one to three pages of results, meaning that the overwhelming majority of results are never seen.)

The study was commissioned to gauge the market demand for a vertical search solution in the automotive industry -- i.e., something that's focused on auto-related results, tailored for automotive consumers -- but vertical search is obviously something that transcends any one industry. Sites like Travelocity.com and Kayak.com, for example, are changing (or, more accurately, have changed) the way people shop for travel online. WebMD is a great example of a health vertical search solution -- with major implications in a major industry -- and Autobytel's MyRide.com, which now provides vertical search for consumers in the world's largest industry (automotive), is one of the newest additions to the vertical search landscape.

Having been involved with search for many years now, I firmly believe that vertical search is an important evolutionary step; a necessary solution for an increasingly chaotic, dense web universe and something that will enable marketers to present ads and information in more strategic ways, to much more targeted audiences of searchers. For example, when a consumer searches for "mustang" on MyRide.com, he is going to get specific content and listings relating to a Ford Mustang car, not horses, and just not a general list of web links. And that's the beauty of vertical search tools: they're designed to meet the information needs of a specific focused group of users, so they can make more precise assumptions about what they're looking for.

As good as some of the current vertical search solutions are, I think we've only scratched the surface in terms of the number of solutions and their sophistication. Seventy-eight percent of the Kelton/Autobytel survey respondents indicated that they wished search engines could, in effect, "read their minds," delivering the results they were actually looking for. Given the scope of variables involved with search, even vertical search, that may sound far-fetched. But, then again, it wasn't all that long ago that we would've said the same thing about doing our holiday shopping at our dining room table. And today people not only expect that convenience, they start to grumble when it's compromised in the slightest.

Jim Riesenbach is president and CEO of Autobytel Inc. Read full bio.