Beating Google
By Peter Porker - Posted on Thu Sep 20, 2007How do you compete with Google and come out on top? Simple. You just need to know how.
History
First, a little historical background.
A few years back (almost several millenia relative to the age of the internet), Yahoo was topdog in the realm of directory listing. You had the colorful pages, great categorization and easy-to-use search algorithm. They were king of the internet hill and anyone who is anyone was on Yahoo - and no one could even think of toppling them from the top.
Not long after, Google came out and they were no ordinary list. They were a search engine! Google had web spiders that crawled the net to catalog and categorize. No longer did anyone need to submit their pages for inclusion - they just had to make sure their site was crawlable. Yahoo was knocked off from their pedestal and Google became top dog.
The Present
Today, Google has maintained its position as head librarian of the entire internet. But it is getting old. Don’t get me wrong - they still have a lot of tricks that they are capable of but the web is yearning for a paradigm shift.
Today, with Universal search, Google has taken its stand as the master list of all that is in and of the internet. Being the master list, it is the most complete generic search engine there is - one that has searcheable info on everything that you will ever look for. That is Google’s strength. Sadly, it is also their greatest weakness.
Enter the vertical search engines. These are small search engines who specialize in a smaller subcategory of information. Their main advantage is that they are experts and masters of their niches not only thematically but also semantically. Meaning, they know their topics well enough to give you search options that Google can’t hope to give. Of course, Google still wins hands down in terms of range and coverage, but do you picture searching for your doctor’s contact info on it? Some would probably answer yes - but for those unlucky ones whose doctor is named John Smith or something more common (or even worse, has a more famous namesake), Google can be rather unforgiving.
Try looking for “Dr. John Smith” and you’ll see that the first medical doctor to appear in the lists come in the second page (barring the chiropractor). You narrow it down by adding “medical doctor” and Google first gives you a wikipedia entry on Dr. Who - the .
Now try looking for Dr. John Smith in a vertical search engine and they might give you options to narrow down the Dr. Smiths by field of specialization, are of practice, etc. See what I mean?
How to Beat Google
Let’s face it - you can never hope to beat Google at its game. It will remain to be top generic search engine. Yahoo is still top directory list, see?
So your only hope of beating Google is giving users something that the universal search cannot give if it wishes to keep its universal status: niche specialization. That way, you get a bigger slice of the users for that niche.
Who are the vertical search engines?
Here is a list of some of the vertical search engines available on the internet today:
VerticalSearch.com - a vertical search engine where you can search for vertical search engines
TopTenWholesale.com - vertical search engine for finding wholesale merchandise to sell
SearchFinance.com - search for financial executives and corporate finance
ThomasNet.com - search for industrial and manufacturing goods and services; it has search by product/service, company name, brand name, industrial websites or CAD model filters;
FindLaw.com, Lawyershop.com and Lawyers.com - search for lawyers by location and specialty
USA.gov - search for all things about the U.S. government, their services and what business necessities you can do online
IT.com - search for tech oriented industry solutions and providers
Yahoo! Local - search for restaurants-and-nightclubs, city guide, health and beauty, automotive, and real estate areas in your locale
Zibb.com - search for business that offers websites and blogs
Docshop.com, Web MD and AMA Doctor Finder - search for doctors and dentists
MTWord.com - search for medical terms, wordlists and drug lists used by medical transcriptionists
RX List - search for medicinal info, dosage and usage
Technorati - search for blogs
Pluggd - search for podcasts; filters for words inside the podcasts themselves using a semantic matching algorithm (meaning it will return podcasts with related terns as well as the word you searched for)
Retrevo - search for consumer electronics
Amazon and Barnes and Noble - search for books
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