SEO Blog

There is a thread over at Jill Whalen’s High Rankings Forum I’ve been watching for just over a month now titled, “Google Base, Is anyone using it?” Like many other industry analysts, I closely monitor as many SEO and SEM related forums as possible in order to get as close a view as possible to how other search marketers think. According to the thread, few of High Rankings members are thinking very much about Google Base.

As I read through the thread, I was surprised to see that nobody mentioned any other vertical search engines. Last year, commentators were suggesting that the development of vertical search engines was indicative of an appropriate and natural fragmentation in the search engine market. In other words, tired of trolling through general search results when looking for something specific, users would turn to a search engine dedicated to serving particular niches.

This sort of thinking was shared by venture capital investment firms, some of which have threw tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars in entrepreneurial start-ups trying to break into the vertical search market over the past three years.