It depends. The Economist has an interesting story on vertical search (disclaimer: our company Mojo Supreme developed the MetaMojo.com vertical search engine and the video meta search engine).
It quotes Charlene Li of Forrester saying that
“Some are already prospering: GlobalSpec.com, for example, a profitable search-engine for engineers, has 3.5m registered users and signs up another 20,000 each week. ‘They own that market’”.
Indeed, but GW has been around forever. Today, there are vertical search engines popping up but it’s very hard to gain any traction. Sure, open source and API have reduced the cost of launching search engines (though using an API is not wise), but in search, distribution is everything.
Only 27% went on to a medical site of any kind, let alone a health-search site. “The path to general search engines is well-worn and familiar,” says Susannah Fox of Pew. “Dr Google is the de facto second opinion in this country.”
Our strategy has always been to create contextual media properties around each vertical category… see for example how we drive targeted travel search volume by having these city directories:
“Find out what the best publishers have to say about Amsterdam, click here.”
I really like seeing other vertical search engines grow and do well but for those that have raised some VC where investors expect a 10x return on their investment and investing in both IT and distribution is expensive, it might be hard to gain much traction.
PLAY
