Vertical search
Encyclopedia
A vertical search engine, as distinct from a general web search engine
, focuses on a specific segment of online content. The vertical content area may be based on topicality, media type, or genre of content. Common verticals include shopping, the automotive industry, legal information, medical information, and travel. In contrast to general Web search engines, which attempt to index large portions of the World Wide Web
using a web crawler
, vertical search engines typically use a focused crawler
that attempts to index only Web pages that are relevant to a pre-defined topic or set of topics.
Some vertical search sites focus on individual verticals, while other sites include multiple vertical searches within one search engine.
Vertical search offers several potential benefits over general search engines:
describes this in his book, The Search:
Web search engine
A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web and FTP servers. The search results are generally presented in a list of results often referred to as SERPS, or "search engine results pages". The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other...
, focuses on a specific segment of online content. The vertical content area may be based on topicality, media type, or genre of content. Common verticals include shopping, the automotive industry, legal information, medical information, and travel. In contrast to general Web search engines, which attempt to index large portions of the World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
using a web crawler
Web crawler
A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, Web spiders, Web robots, or—especially in the FOAF community—Web scutters.This process is called Web...
, vertical search engines typically use a focused crawler
Focused crawler
A focused crawler or topical crawler is a web crawler that attempts to download only web pages that are relevant to a pre-defined topic or set of topics. Topical crawling generally assumes that only the topic is given, while focused crawling also assumes that some labeled examples of relevant and...
that attempts to index only Web pages that are relevant to a pre-defined topic or set of topics.
Some vertical search sites focus on individual verticals, while other sites include multiple vertical searches within one search engine.
Vertical search offers several potential benefits over general search engines:
- Greater precision due to limited scope
- Leverage domain knowledge including taxonomiesTaxonomyTaxonomy is the science of identifying and naming species, and arranging them into a classification. The field of taxonomy, sometimes referred to as "biological taxonomy", revolves around the description and use of taxonomic units, known as taxa...
and ontologies - Support specific unique user tasks
Domain-specific search
Domain-specific verticals focus on a specific topic. John BattelleJohn Battelle
John Linwood Battelle is a journalist as well as founder and chairman of Federated Media Publishing. He is a visiting professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley and also maintains Searchblog, a weblog covering search, technology, and media.Battelle is one of the original...
describes this in his book, The Search:
Domain-specific search solutions focus on one area of knowledge, creating customized search experiences, that because of the domain's limited corpus and clear relationships between concepts, provide extremely relevant results for searchers.