Searching on the GYM -- Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft -- has become more of a workout than ever before. The billions of cached pages, pictures, videos, local results, and social network content being indexed in search engine results pages (SERPs) have resulted in more complexity than ever before for business users seeking information.
Google enjoys a 65 to 74 percent market share of conducted searches in the U.S., according to comScore and Hitwise, respectively. These numbers peaked last year and have been dropping gradually, and some of this traffic is going to industry verticals, as business professionals begin to realize the advantages of vertical search over Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
It's been well known since 2006 that business users have trouble finding relevant information on general search engines. The Outsell study reported general search engines failed business professionals on relevance more than 30 percent of the time. The Convera study reported only four out of 10 professionals were satisfied with general search engines. Respondents to the Convera 2009 VSE-B2B report found the major benefits of vertical search to be "quicker to find desired information" (67 percent), "top results more relevant" (65 percent), and "focused on specific business interests and workflow" (64 percent).
Verticals are highly focused
Vertical search engines are focused on specific content, which can be industry-based or topic-based. Industry-based sites include Ebuild for construction and home improvement products, FindLaw for attorney practice-specific legal information, and GlobalSpec for engineering procurement. Topic-based verticals include WebMD for health information and The Internet Movie Database for information about movies and actors. A complete review of vertical search can be found in "The Emerging Opportunity in Vertical Search" (PDF) from SearchChannel and Slack Barshinger.
Why B2B marketers need vertical search
Today's users are faced with search overload, which is good news for consumers but bad news for business folks. Engineers will sift through myriad results looking for a credible supplier on Google, but not on GlobalSpec. Retail buyers sourcing merchandise for back-to-school shoppers can go to an industry vertical to compare sellers and merchandise, or research for credible sellers.
It's hard for business pros to source on GYM, because these engines were not designed for commercial use. Archie and Gopher were created for academia and then morphed into the commercial web as WebCrawler, Yahoo, and Google. The major difference between general and vertical engines is the algorithm. General search relies heavily on popularity, rewarding sites with authoritative inbound links.
However, B2B publishers don't get ranked on general engines because most are laggards behind the curve. They build an information page or poorly constructed websites that are ignored by Google. That means mainstream search users miss out on many valuable resources because traditional crawlers and ranking mechanisms will never rank the average B2B site on the first page of results.
On the other hand, vertical search engines use customized algorithms and search strings created to put relevant results directly in front of targeted B2B buyers in "search and buy" mode. That's why business professionals get better results with vertical search.
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