Vertical search

Benefits of Vertical Search - Greater precision due to limited scope - Leverage domain knowledge including taxonomies and ontologies - Support of specific unique user tasks - Similar to enterprise search where the domain of focus is the enterprise - Consumer price comparison websites with integrated vertical search engines have received large rounds of venture capital funding, indicating growth in this technology. Domain-specific Search - Domain-specific verticals focus on a specific topic - Customized search experiences provide extremely relevant results - Domain-specific search engines efficiently search a small subset of documents - Spidering with a reinforcement-learning framework is three times more efficient than breadth-first search - General search engines index all pages and searches in a breadth-first manner DARPAs Memex program - DARPA's Memex program aims to develop new search technologies - Memex aims to search for information on the Deep Web, which is largely unreachable by commercial search engines - The technology being developed in the Memex program aims to uncover patterns and relationships in online data to help law enforcement track illegal activity - DARPA intends for the program to replace centralized procedures used by commercial search engines - Memex is named as a tribute to Bush's original Memex invention References - Data-Driven Comparison Shopping Platform FindTheBest raised $11M in venture capital funding - Asian Price Comparison Site Save 22 received an angel round of mid six figures - John Battelle's book 'The Search: How Google and its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture' discusses domain-specific search solutions - Andrew McCallum's paper 'A Machine Learning Approach to Building Domain-Specific Search Engines' explores the use of machine learning in domain-specific search engines - DARPA's website provides information on the Memex program and its goals Other Information - Vertical search engines focus on specific segments of online content - They are also called specialty or topical search engines - Verticals can be based on topicality, media type, or genre of content - Vertical search engines typically use a focused crawler to index relevant web pages - Some sites include multiple vertical searches within one search engine