A vertical search engine is a specialized search engine. Instead of focusing on general search terms, These search engines focus more on specialty or topical search.
Vertical search sites, like LinkedIn, are specialized search engines that focus on industry-specific searches or specific queries available in general search engines like Google.
These search engines are extremely specific and only focus on terms distinctive to an industry. For example, sites like LinkedIn focus only on jobs, work-related queries, and other services.
A few more examples of such sites include:
- E-commerce sites like Amazon, BestBuy, and Etsy.
- Search engines for rentals like Airbnb and HomeAway.
- Search engines for employment like LinkedIn and Glassdoor.
The difference between vertical and general search engines like Google or Yahoo is that they index and rank content from the entire world wide web to find relevant search results for a query. A vertical search engine will only bring up search results that are industry specific and is limited by a narrower search via the number of finds it can pull.
In this article, you’ll find:
- Does This Mean You Won’t Get Vertical Search Abilities In Google?
- What Are The Benefits Of Vertical Search?
- What Is Horizontal Search?
- What Is VSO?
- Importance Of Vertical Search Engines
- Related Reads
Does This Mean You Won’t Get Vertical Search Abilities In Google?
On the contrary, when used correctly, you can get vertical search results specific to your query. Google already has vertical search tools embedded in the search engine results page, which lies in plain sight. While Google has specialized search abilities it is not as accurate as other search engines, such as Airbnb.
The above example shows that Google has placed tabs for each category, like images and shopping. Clicking on images will bring up images that are posted in any type of content across the web.
More examples of vertical search in Google include
- Google images
- Google maps
- Google flights
- Google maps
- Google news
- Google books
- Google videos
What Are The Benefits Of Vertical Search?
Vertical searches offer benefits over general search engines for precision, taxonomy, and web crawler focus.
1. Precision
Since vertical searches only focus on industry-specific terms and content, the scope is limited. This means that you will be able to get more accurate search results because the results are taken only from the industry you specifically searched for.
For example, if you search for “hotels in Bali,” Google will bring up anything found with those keywords. But, if you search for the same term on a vertical search engine like Airbnb, you can get far better results with much more detail and accuracy.
2. Taxonomy
In the context of search engines, taxonomy refers to the classification methods that help improve search results’ relevance in vertical search engines.
In simple words, Taxonomy is a metadata that is used to narrow down search results for the users and offer them a better experience.
3. Focused Crawler
Many vertical search engines use a focused crawler to index pages for their search engine results page. A focused crawler only collects web pages that are related to the search query and the specific industry. As part of this process, it prioritizes crawl frontiers and manages the hyperlink exploration process.
A general web search engine, on the other hand, will use a regular web crawler (spider bot) to crawl the web and find related content from all industries.
What Is Horizontal Search?
A horizontal search engine is the opposite of a vertical search. Instead of searching for industry-specific or niche information, it focuses on finding and broadly indexing content. A common example of horizontal search is Google, where you can find search results containing different categories mixed together. However, they still offer vertical search technology in their search engines, like maps, flights, books, images, and news.
Horizontal search is more general when compared to other vertical search engines because it covers different topics and merges them under the same search results.
What Is VSO?
The term VSO stands for “Vertical Search Optimization.” Basically, it means optimizing your content for vertical search engines. The difference between this and other forms of search results optimization is that in VSO, the primary focus is ranking better for vertical search sites like YouTube, Etsy, Amazon, and other vertical search sites.
On regular search sites, you would have to focus on ranking higher on Google’s universal search engine results page, but here you’re applying a narrower focus.
Importance Of Vertical Search Engines
Vertical search solutions are beneficial for those looking for niche topics or specific queries because through vertical, they will be able to get answers that are narrowed down from general search results. Standard search engines like Google would bring up broad and too general results. Sometimes, you need information that is specific to your search queries.
This is where vertical search sites come in handy because you will no longer have to feel overwhelmed by a large amount of information presented to you. Instead, you will get a limited data set but only those that are relevant.
Related Reads
7 Tips to Outsource Link Building
What Should You Not Do in a Link Building?
Link Building for Search Engine Marketing: Here’s What We Found
