« Search Query Oddity of the Week: October 16-20, 2006 | Main | SES Registration - Now Five Times as Open! »
Help Google Tackle Vertical with a Custom Search Engine
October 24, 2006
The big buzz this morning (Threadwatch, SEW Blog, WebmasterWorld) appears to be Google's announcement that it's allowing users to create custom engines based on the main Google index.
On the technical side, this is little more than using a subset of Google's index to narrow the number of specific sources that appear on a Google results page. In other words, if you're a dentist hoping to create the Next Great Dental Search Engine, you could tell Google to include only the sites you want, perhaps such as the American Dental Association, your own site, a few hand-picked dental blogs (I'm sure they exist ... right?), and so on.
This way, when someone searches for [plaque] on your custom dental engine, you won't get any trophy shops popping up in the results.
This is nothing new. Sites like Rollyo have been doing it for a while (although they're somewhat parasitic, using Google's index as a back end). But Google offers more horsepower than the others, letting your trusted users help you build the list of resources your engine uses, as well as letting you add thousands of sites into your custom index.
So let's call this what it really is. I've talked before about the potential power of small, vertical engines vs. large, catch-all indexes like Google's. It's pretty much understood that Google owns the latter segment. With this announcement, Google is offering its users the distinct privilege of enabling Google to own the first.
Matt Cutts pretty much sums up the potential here (emphasis added):
I do think that this launch will kick off a lot of opportunity that not everyone will see or understand at first. For example, the first person to make a truly kick-butt search engine about biking will likely start to attract volunteers and traction and first-mover attention, and could very well become the authority search for that niche. I think that this launch could kick off a wave of search over a long tail of niches; rather than a big vertical like “health,� someone could make a search for the much much smaller “health at every size� movement.
So Google is leveraging the power of communities to let communities themselves build their own vertical search sites. And Google runs its ads alongside these highly-targeted, loyal-user sites.
Smart and efficient. Sounds like in addition to C++ Programming Fundamentals, a few Googlers have been reading Tom Sawyer too.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at October 24, 2006 08:20 AM
Intrapromote: [ Case studies | SEO services | Bios ]
Trackback Pings
To TrackBack this entry, use the following URL:
http://seoblog.intrapromote.com/mt-tb.cgi/311
Comments
This article still ranks well. Congrats!
Posted by: charles at October 6, 2008 12:04 PM