A vertical search engine, as distinct from a general web search engine, focuses on a specific segment of online content. They are also call specialty or topical search engines. 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, scholarly literature, and travel. Examples of vertical search engines include Trulia and Yelp. 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:
- Greater precision due to limited scope,
- Leverage domain knowledge including taxonomies and ontologies,
- Support of specific unique user tasks.
Vertical search can be viewed as similar to enterprise search where the domain of focus is the enterprise, such as a company, government or other organization.
Read more about Vertical Search: Domain-specific Search
Famous quotes containing the words vertical and/or search:
“In bourgeois society, the French and the industrial revolution transformed the authorization of political space. The political revolution put an end to the formalized hierarchy of the ancien regimé.... Concurrently, the industrial revolution subverted the social hierarchy upon which the old political space was based. It transformed the experience of society from one of vertical hierarchy to one of horizontal class stratification.”
—Donald M. Lowe, U.S. historian, educator. History of Bourgeois Perception, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1982)
“It no longer makes sense to speak of “feeding problems” or “sleep problems” or “negative behavior” is if they were distinct categories, but to speak of “problems of development” and to search for the meaning of feeding and sleep disturbances or behavior disorders in the developmental phase which has produced them.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)