Google Vertical Search – What’s it all about
So what is the new vertical search in Google all about? In a nutshell it means you can search for a term within a specialised field rather than across the whole of the web. A number of specific searches have been introduced into Google allowing you to search within blogs, videos, news, books, places and a whole lot more.
A regular search in Google or any other search engine such as Yahoo or Bing is known as a ‘horizontal’ search which means you are searching across a wide spectrum of material that is available. The information can be from news sites, sports sites, political sites, shopping sites. In other words the entire horizontal spectrum of topics is represented.
With Google vertical search a focused crawler rather than a web crawler is used to index only web pages that are relevant to a pre-defined topic or set of topics. You are virtually slicing down vertically through one topic area. The search you conduct is only against the relevant topic, for example choosing news will search against news sites or choosing sports will only search against sports sites. By using this type of search the focus is more specific and means more relevant results will be returned.
Google has implemented its vertical search services as links on the left hand side of the search page that allow you search:
- Everything
- Images
- Videos
- Blogs
- Places
- News
- Shopping
- Books
- Real Time
- Discussions
The impact of Google Vertical Searches have already begun showing a direct impact on page rankings through focused crawlers that are only indexing pages and content that is directly related to a given topic.
Over the next few weeks we will be covering each Google Vertical Search in more depth.
Please follow us @bluecubeuk on Twitter for information on blog updates, and feel free to subscribe to our feed.
About seoblogger:
Our SEO blogger is an expert in Web Marketing, Usability and Interface Design. He has been a vital part of The Blue Cube Communications since 2003. As the West Midlands fastest growing web marketing agency, we always strive to maximise return on investment for our customers.
