A week or two ago I read with interest a series of blog debate postings which started with Tom Evslin's "There Won't Be Vertical Search Engines". Fred Wilson was quick to parry with his "Vertical Search" article.
I think both sides of the debate have one serious flaw: both see only two sides of the debate.
Technology always converges toward generic hybrids. We used to have 100 different ways to search for information in periodicals. I used to subscribe to a CDROM back in 1992 called "Computer Library". It was an amazing tool (at the time) which had about 100 periodicals on a CD that you'd get every month. It used a Lotus-built program to do the searching. I was amazed at the amount of information at my fingertips. 500 megabytes! The web made that obsolete through convergence and the ultimate generic hybrid is HTML over HTTP. Who would have thunk it?
So, back to vertical search engines...
Right now, vertical search engines are like "Computer Library". Wow, it's so cool that all this airline information is right here at my fingertips! Wow, isn't it great that Chemical Abstracts are (still) available in a vertical search engine! Wow, wouldn't it be cool if there were more vertical search engines!
As search engines become more sophisticated, and semantic information is incorporated into web nodes, we'll see the same convergence. Tim keeps talking about the Semantic Web and I really believe someday it will happen. Be patient. Then, search engines will begin using the semantic information, and combined with your own particular interest, searches will become "vertical" automatically as you need them to, and then become more "horizontal" as you need them to. Automatically. Search engines will converge into a hybrid which has no horizontal-vertical continuum but instead is one integrated whole.
I'll call this "Perspective Search".
I'm about to travel to Las Vegas: Search will take that perspective into account. I will find Las Vegas opportunities. The engine knows I'm interested in Science. The new Atomic Test Museum will appear. My flights will be there too. Oh look, I can upgrade. I can get better rates.
A "perspective" is your view of the activity. You might choose to take a "research", "planning", "travel", or "entertainment" perspective. The search engine will cut across all available information based upon semantic cues so that you see the right angle. It's like a n-dimensional data cube where each side of the cube is based upon parameters both collected and stated.
But, maybe vertical search will have a place for a while. After all, people still write payroll programs. Go figure that one out!
Comments