Vertical search engines focus on specific
niches of web content, including images, videos, news, travel, and
people. Such engines exist to provide value to their user base in ways that
go beyond what traditional web search engines provide.One area where vertical search engines can excel in comparison to
their more general web search counterparts is in providing more relevant
results in their specific category. They may accomplish this by any number
of means, including making assumptions about user intent based on their
vertical nature (an option that full web search engines do not normally
have), specialized crawls, more human review, and the ability to leverage
specialized databases of information (potentially including databases not
available online).
There is a lot of opportunity in vertical search. SEO professionals
need to seriously consider what potential benefits vertical search areas can
provide to their websites. Of course, there are significant differences in
how you optimize for vertical search engines.
The Opportunities in Vertical Search
Vertical search has been around for almost as long as the major
search engines have been in existence. Some of the first vertical search
engines were for image search, news group search, and news search, but
many other vertical search properties have emerged since then, both from
the major search engines and from third parties.
This article will focus on strategies for optimizing your website
for the vertical search offerings from Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. We will
also spend some time on YouTube, which in January 2009 became the second
largest search engine on the Web. First we will look at the data for how
vertical search volume compares to regular web search. The data in Table 1 comes from Hitwise, and
shows the top 20 Google domains as of May 2006, which is one year before
the advent of Universal Search.
Table 1. Most popular Google properties, May 2006
| Rank | Name | Share |
|---|
| 1 | Google | 79.98% |
| 2 | Google Image Search | 9.54% |
| 3 | Google Mail | 5.51% |
| 4 | Google News | 1.49% |
| 5 | Google Maps | 0.82% |
| 6 | Froogle | 0.46% |
| 7 | Google Video Search | 0.46% |
| 8 | Google Groups | 0.43% |
| 9 | Google Scholar | 0.27% |
| 10 | Google Book Search | 0.25% |
| 11 | Google Earth | 0.22% |
| 12 | Google Desktop Search | 0.18% |
| 13 | Google Directory | 0.10% |
| 14 | Google Answers | 0.09% |
| 15 | Google AdWords | 0.07% |
| 16 | Google Local | 0.05% |
| 17 | Google Finance | 0.03% |
| 18 | Google Calendar | 0.01% |
| 19 | Google Talk | 0.01% |
| 20 | Google Labs | 0.01% |
In May 2006, image search comprised almost 10% of Google search
volume. Pair this with the knowledge that a smaller number of people on
the Web optimize their sites properly for image search (or other vertical
search engines) and you can see how paying attention to vertical search
can pay tremendous dividends.
Of course, just getting the traffic is not enough. You also need to
be able to use that traffic. If someone is coming to your site just to
steal your image, for example, this traffic is likely not of value to you.
So, although a lot of traffic may be available, you should not ignore the
importance of determining how to engage users with your site. For
instance, you could serve up some custom content for visitors from an
image search engine to highlight other areas on your site that might be of
interest, or embed logos/references into your images so that they carry
branding value as they get “stolen” and republished on and off the
Web.
1. Universal Search and Blended Search
In May 2007, Google announced Universal Search, which integrated
vertical search results into main web results.
Thinking of it another way, Google’s web results used to be a kind
of vertical search engine itself, one focused specifically on web pages
(and not images, videos, news, blogs, etc.). With the advent of
Universal Search, Google changed the web page search engine into a
search engine for any type of online content. Figure 1 shows some examples of Universal
Search results, starting with a Google search on
iphone.
Notice the video results (labeled “Video results for iphone”) and
the news results (labeled “News results for iphone”). This is vertical
search being incorporated right into traditional web search results.
Figure 2 shows the results
for a search on i have a dream.
Right there in the web search results, you can click on a video
and watch the famous Martin Luther King, Jr., speech. You can see
another example of an embedded video by searching on one small
step for man as well.
The other search engines (Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Ask) moved very
quickly to follow suit. As a result, the industry uses the generic term
Blended Search for this notion of including
vertical search data in web results.
2. The Opportunity Unleashed
As we noted at the beginning of this article, the opportunity in
vertical search was significant before the advent
of Universal Search and Blended Search. However, that opportunity was
not fully realized because many (in fact, most) users were not even
aware of the vertical search properties. With the expansion of Blended
Search, the opportunities for vertical search have soared.
However, the actual search volume for http://images.google.com has dropped a bit, as shown in
Table 2, which lists
data from Hitwise for February 2009.
Table 2. Most popular Google properties, February 2009
| Rank | Name | Share |
|---|
| 1 | Google | 68.42% |
| 2 | Gmail | 9.62% |
| 3 | YouTube | 9.41% |
| 4 | Google Images | 5.76% |
| 5 | Google Maps | 2.08% |
| 6 | Google News | 1.38% |
| 7 | Google Video | 0.54% |
| 8 | Blogger | 0.46% |
| 9 | Google Calendar | 0.43% |
| 10 | Google Groups | 0.38% |
| 11 | Google Book Search | 0.31% |
| 12 | Google Docs & Spreadsheets | 0.26% |
| 13 | Google Finance | 0.23% |
| 14 | Google Earth | 0.20% |
| 15 | Orkut | 0.09% |
| 16 | Google Scholar | 0.08% |
| 17 | Google Pack | 0.07% |
| 18 | Picasa by Google | 0.04% |
| 19 | Google Answers | 0.04% |
| 20 | Google Checkout | 0.04% |
| 21 | Google Chrome | 0.03% |
| 22 | Google AdWords | 0.03% |
| 23 | Google Code | 0.02% |
| 24 | SketchUp | 0.02% |
| 25 | Google Desktop Search | 0.02% |
| 26 | Google Directory | 0.01% |
| 27 | Google Base | 0.01% |
| 28 | Google Talk | 0.01% |
| 29 | Google Groups 2 Beta | 0.00% |
| 30 | Google Labs | 0.00% |
| 31 | Google Web Accelerator | 0.00% |
| 32 | Froogle | 0.00% |
| 33 | Google Moon | 0.00% |
| 34 | Google Catalogs | 0.00% |
This drop is most likely driven by the fact that image results get
returned within regular web search, and savvy searchers are entering
specific queries that append leading words such as
photos, images, and
pictures to their search phrases when that is what
they want.
For site owners, this means new opportunities to gain visibility
in the SERPs. By adding a blog, releasing online press releases to
authoritative wire services, uploading video to sites such as YouTube, and adding a Google Local listing, businesses
increase the chances of having search result listings that may directly
or indirectly drive traffic to their sites.
It also means site owners must think beyond the boundaries of
their own websites. Many of these vertical opportunities come from
one-time engagements or small additional efforts to maximize the
potential of activities that are already being performed.
