If you listen to industry observers, vertical search is a tool with a lot of appeal for users, many of whom are reportedly growing weary of getting back 10 pages of results on a single-word query. Of course, it can also be an effective strategy for the engines taking that vertical approach: It means they’re not forced to compete head-on with the turbo-charged likes of Google and Yahoo! but can crawl portions of the Web, sometimes offering more comprehensive coverage in those defined areas than the big guys.
That’s the approach being adopted by Halifax, Nova Scotia-based GenieKnows.com. The company was spun out of a research project at nearby Dalhousie University in 1999 and began life as a metasearch crawler, aggregating results from 24 other engines and feeds. “We were all set up to start receiving VC money, but after March 2000 that didn’t materialize,” says Mark Harper, vice president of strategic relations.
Current CEO Barbara Manning took over the privately-held parent company, IT Interactive Services, in 2001 and began assembling the parts needed for a pay-per-click ad platform that went life in 2003, both on Genie’s search results pages and on a network of Web publisher pages.
Rather than relying on the continuing viability of metasearch, GenieKnows also opted in 2004 to start developing a proprietary algorithm and to apply it to local search. More recently, GenieKnows has rolled out beta versions of vertical searches in three key fields, Health, business and gaming.
R&D director Tony Abou-Assaleh has been in his post for about ten months now and says both he and his predecessor worked in the knowledge that while building a search engine from scratch is a big job, going head-to-head with Google or Yahoo! on general Web-wide search would be even more daunting.
“We’re not in direct competition with any of the big search engines,” he says. “There’s a large population of users who won’t find our site useful, because they will be looking for something that we don’t provide search for. We provide directed search in specific domains, for example in the health field. If you are searching for something related to health, you’ll be better off on our engine than on one of the general ones because there’s less noise from non-health-related Web sites.”
GenieKnows claims to be indexing 20 million pages for each of its three verticals and promises to increase that count to 100 million per niche in the early part of 2007.
The GenieKnows search site is “very much a rough diamond right now,” says Harper. “There are spam detection and eradication issues that we want to brush up on.” And in fact, the engine is still wrangling with spam sites. A business search on a broad keyword such as “loan” or the more specific “home loan” brings up Yahoo! Finance results first but then serves a large helping of the usual “home loan, home mortgage, home equity” spammers and gateway sites.
Harper says GenieKnows wants to solve those issues before making a big push to pull in users. “Before we start with a strategic marketing plan driving traffic in to the Web site, we want to make sure it’s at least 95%, 96% complete,” he says. But Genie does have a marketing plan in mind that goes after very targeted demographics—when the time is right, he says.
But Harper says advertisers are not waiting for perfection. “They love being alongside content that is relevant to their companies,” Harper says. “If I’m approaching Pfizer, and they’ve got a new cancer-treatment drug, then they want to be in front of users who are searching for cancer treatments. We think that if we hit the sweet spot—if we get the technology right and market it correctly—then advertisers will come in droves to be associated with this type of product.”
Genie sells its own sponsored listings for the topic verticals but syndicates PPC ads from Superpages.com and CitySearch for the local search function. “We wanted to have relevant local listings, and they’ve got the sales force to sell to small neighborhood businesses,” Harper says. “In local search, relevance of sponsored listings is as important as relevance of natural results.”
Of course, the big search engines have also been apprised of the value of vertical search to their users and have created their own vertical portal sites (although not vertical search) in some of the same fields—health and business—that Genie is working in. Do Google Finance, Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! Health negate Genie’s flanking strategy, bringing it back into direct competition with the big players?
Abou-Assaleh doesn’t think that’s necessarily the case. “These search engines all provide slightly different capabilities and features,” he says. “That’s why some people use Google, while others use Yahoo! or Ask. What we are going to do will also be a little bit different, providing some unique features. And hopefully there will be users who find our search better than these others for their specific needs in these verticals.”
For example, he points out, a Google search on “health addiction” will bring up a long list of Web sites that use both those keywords, with the top results mostly Web pages for specific treatment centers. But a search on “addiction” in the GenieKnows health engine serves up more general resources on the issue and directories of treatment centers in its top results. That might make Genie’s information more generally useful to someone just beginning to look for online help with a problem.
There’s also a list of categories within each search result, so that the “addiction” searcher can jump quickly to results for children, men, teens or specific substances.
And interestingly, a search under “addiction” in the gaming engine does a pretty good job of serving up Web sites with information specifically about gambling problems.
Future vertical searches in travel and sports are planned. But for the moment, one big question is: Why a vertical search on gaming? The engine is explicitly linked to gambling rather than computer or console games, with suggested searches on topics such as poker, blackjack, slots and craps. Is that a good choice two months after President Bush signed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act regulating gambling payments to online operators?
“It’s obviously something that we’re following closely,” Harper says. “But here in Canada, we’re outside the reach of the long arm of U.S. law. We think it may give us an advantage, making advertisers within that vertical more anxious to come to us to place their ads, especially if they can’t go to Google or Yahoo! We have to be very careful how we promote the site in the U.S., but our international paid search platform services 18 different countries, including most of Europe, where online gaming has been legislated in. The U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Spain—those areas are very strong for us in that particular vertical.”