Technology: Benefits To Using Vertical Search Engines

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Assume for a moment that you are trying to book a flight online. There are of course many ways to get the job done. The question is —what's the best way?

You could go to a general search engine such as Google or Yahoo, and search for the term "flights." The list of results would likely lead you to a discount Web site. Orbitz.com is an especially popular one.

What's wrong with this approach? Search for the term "flights" on Google and the search engine will display some 93 million results. How do you know which sites are the best? Some of the top-ranked sites aren't even based in the United States.

An alternative is the vertical search engine, a relative newcomer to the search engine front. The idea is to restrict the number of Web sites a search engine crawls and generate a smaller, more targeted list of search results.

Searching for a flight on farecast.com, a vertical search engine, would allow you to get prices from the all of the airlines, and Orbitz, all in one place.

Give someone enough time, and even a novice Internet user can probably find their way to book a flight online, even if they don't discover the best price. Finding information on cleaning is a different matter however.

The problem is the specialized vocabulary that comes with cleaning. Some of the biggest issues of concern to distributors, building service contractors and in-house service professionals are sometimes outweighed on the search engines by the sheer volume of information related to the much larger consumer market. Or in some cases, searches that one might expect to bring up cleaning information find it buried under an avalanche of totally unrelated results.

Enter CleanHound. The vertical market search engine for cleaning professionals searches more than 2 million facility-related Web pages, including sites for manufacturers, associations, government organizations and trade publications.

Because CleanHound is confined to the world of cleaning, it knows the vocabulary. And so when users search for "cross-contamination,” for example, on CleanHound, the top search results are aimed at cleaning professionals, whereas the top search results on Google are aimed at homeowners.

The true barometer of quality for a search engine is the value and relevance of its results for its users. Google, Yahoo and other popular search engines search millions of Web pages and may return thousands of results, depending on the specificity of the search terms. For distributors, BSCs and ISPs, the value of a vertical search is in the more refined search results, which gives better information. Limiting the universe of Web sites search automatically weeds out the chaff, reducing the time spent searching.

Better Results, Quicker
To target searches even more, CleanHound has the capability to search for articles related to the search terms entered.

The CleanHound Article Search function, available on the CleanHound home page (www.cleanhound.com), crawls hundreds of industry trade publications and Web sites, more than 560,000 industry-related Web pages in total, and returns results more targeted than those that the major search engines could provide.

For example, enter the search term “green” on a general search engine, and you’ll get everything from the Green Political Party to the alternative music group Green Day. Entering “green” on CleanHound’s Article Search function yields results of articles specifically covering environmentally-preferable cleaning.