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Follow on TwitterThis year I’ve been making a real effort to become fitter. As part of that I’ve joined a gym, started mountain biking again and resumed a regular running schedule. In each case I’ve needed (or wanted) to buy equipment to maximise the benefit and enjoyment I get from the activity. I’ve brought new running shoes, replaced my old heart rate monitor, spares for my bike and most recently a power rack and set of Olympic weights.
Being the geek that I am, most purchases have been done over the Internet after spending time researching the best product and searching for the best deal once I’ve decided exactly which product I want. As a result I’ve spent a long time using Google, working though pages of results trying to find exactly what I want. I’ve also spent a long time working through various e-commerce websites – rant: I can’t believe that in this day and age people buy pay per click ads on product keywords and then link them to their home page instead of the product page!
As a result of the experience I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s a huge number of business opportunities developing vertical search engines. For those than don’t know, a vertical search is one that specialises on a specific vertical. For example a search engine that specialises in heart rate monitors or running shoes, providing a powerful search based on the specific features of each product and the availability of supplier for each one. The vertical that seems to attract most interest is jobs – there are hundreds of vertical search engines for jobs, but few to none for most other verticals.
So what’s the downside? Well you’ve got to produce a better search engine that Google – not as hard as it sounds given you’re going to specialise – but it’s probably going to cost, depending on the vertical, between £50,000 and £500,000 just to get a prototype up and running. The return on investment is never going to match Google’s either, as you’re focusing on a narrow vertical slice of the Internet you’re effectively targeting a niche market, meaning less revenue potential (you’ll probably have to settle for millions instead of billions).
Being a geek, the business opportunities in vertical search excite me…
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This blog is about business opportunities and ideas that I spot, think of or hear about and think are useful and interesting. It is intended to provide ideas and inspriation for you to help you find the right business idea for you to then grow it into a successful business.
It’s an obvious idea but I think comparison shopping sites offer pretty much this functionality already, allowing you to fine tune your search by category, plus they have a built in revenue stream through referrals.
I’d have to disagree for two reasons:
1) I failed to find any comparison shopping sites for some of the verticals, so there’s a business opportunity there;
2) vertical search is not limited to comparison shopping (although it’s the easiest example to give).
I think it could work. You would need to be pretty clued up though to get it up and running, and if you paid somebody you would almost certainly need enough knowledge to be able to tweak it for optimum results.
How would you monetize it though?
Yeah, it’s definitely an idea for the geeks like me.
When it comes to monetizing a vertical search engine there are a number of options. Firstly there’s copying Google – natural results with ads sold alongside. Alternately there’s pay-for-inclusion (ala Yahoo Directory), affiliate schemes or charging people for access to the search engine (as many data companies do with their data).
That’s the advantage of being a geek though. While others are fumbling around tring to find the on button, you could be finshing off a mini google in the form of vertical search engine. Ahhh what power!
The beauty is that the code and algo could be adapted to create other vertical search engines, thus reducing role out cost for building a portfolio of vertical search engines. (Followed by Dr. Evil pinkie in mouth impression)
sssh! You’re giving away my secrets!
Lol.. What was I thinking?!!