Core Search Gains Ground From Specialists

Over the last few years, the online search market - whilst being dominated in many territories by the goliath that is Google - has still managed to offer users many alternatives to the big players, with a plethora of specialised search engines coming to market.  These vertical search engines, offering focused search both for users and search engine marketing brands alike, have given searchers supposedly better targeted access across the likes of travel, retail, mobile, and jobs, to name but a few.  For users coming from the often bewildering array of results the early Google and its competitors would produce from their trawling of the (very) wide web, these vertical search engines could often seem the perfect solution.

According to comScore, of the 27 billion searches conducted in the US on desktops in July 2011, some 9.6 billion - some 35% - were conducted on vertical search platforms.

However, with Google and other search engines' constant refining of their algorithms to provide better and more targeted search results, the need for such narrowly defined search tools is lessening.  That 9.6 billion is actually down from 10.2 billion a year earlier despite total searches going up from 25.4 to 27 billion; so vertical search share has actually fallen from just over 40%.

As Google and others continue to develop their technologies to better discern user intent - for example, learning from a user's previous searches, both over the short and medium term - the need for vertical search is likely to further wane.