The Fallacy of Vertical Search

Vertical search is a very big topic right now for B2B publishers. It’s been covered in the business media press, covered in special sessions at media events like the DeSilva + Phillips 2006 Media Dealmakers Summit, the ABM Spring Meeting in Scottsdale, (sorry y’all, really wish I would have been able to come to that, but had a prior family committment), and several others. ABM is even hosting a full day meeting on the topic May 15th in New York. Is it really the next big revenue opportunity for publishers?

I personally don’t believe it. Hear me out…

It’s very interesting that all of the big players that are being held up as examples of successful vertical search — Globalspec, ThomasNet, Business.com, BitPipe — aren’t necessarily pure vertical searches. Rather the key to their success in my opinion is their ability to aggregate content. All of these examples start with huge amounts of content on their own site at their core and then have added on the ability to search across other web sites.

• Globalspec has aggregated product catalogs from engineering companies that you can browse or search using product parameters. But all of this data is aggregated on their own web site giving them lots of content and is their core product. They launched their Engineering Web(r) section that truly goes out and indexes other web sites much later and this is the only part of Globalspec that is a true vertical search.
• ThomasNet’s core is its industrial directory. Yes, they have other services, their industrial news room, and they do have the new Industrial Web search. But the directory is it’s primary content and only the Industrial Web search is a true vertical search.
• Business.com is also a directory at its core. You can be listed in their directory and you can buy pay-per-click ads. It does have a relationship with Google to power true web searches, but again, only that part is true vertical search in my opinion.
• BitPipe has aggregated an impressive database of vendor content (whitepaper, case studies, webcasts, etc) in the IT market.

Do a Google site:{domain} search on any of these sites and see what you get:

• site:globalspec.com — 2,620,000 pages indexed in Google
• site:thomasnet.com — 5,600,000 pages indexed in Google
• site:business.com — 1,610,000 pages indexed in Google
• site:bitpipe.com — 3,510,000 pages indexed in Google

Notice a pattern here? They have millions of pages of content and have done a great job of search engine optimization. Is it any wonder that they generate really good traffic and thus can generate good revenue? Everyone could make a ton of money if you had a web site with millions of pages of content.

I’m not saying that these companies and others haven’t done a good job … quite the contrary! They have done an extraordinary job at aggregating massive amounts of content, organizing it, promoting it through SEO, and generating audiences. But I don’t personally believe it has much to do with vertical search at all, but their ability to aggregate great databases of content that help business professionals do their job.

Maybe I’m splitting hairs here, but I think it’s very important that online publishers realize the distinction between vertical search and content aggregation.