Vertical Search engines
As everyone knows, the amount of information on the Internet- good, bad and indiifferent- continues its upward spiral of growth. This is taxing the search engines, which face the near-sisyphean task of finding, sorting, and ranking all this stuff. The major search engines do an amazing job but I find that an awful lot of junk gets high rankings. Even with a lot of boolean filtering, I still have to wade through many pages of mostly useless listings when I am researching a subject.
A possible way that this information overload may be alleviated is through what are called vertical search engines. Instead of trying to catalogue everything, these search engines limit themselves to some specific topic or range of topics. Unable to compete with Google for the general advertising dollar, specialized search engines are springing up with the hope of attracting advertisers who want a focused group as a target. Even Google is getting into the game with its custom search engine.
There are, in fact a lot of specialized search engines. One directory is at Search Engine Guide. Another possible place to look is Search Engine 2 which has a custom Google search engine to search for search engines.
Added later in the day: Here’s a link from SearchEngineWatch I forgot to mention.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.