Nano2Sol by Marc Boucher

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will now be required to make public all of the research it funds 12 months after it’s published. For the vertical search space this provides a huge boost as we’ll be able to crawl the complete text of papers and make useful searchable products from them.

ReadWriteWeb brought this to my attention in their post NIH: $29b in Health Science Set to Go Online for Free. Here’s their take on it;

This should open up a whole world of new opportunities for online research. Readers outside of the academic world but aware of the financial future of health information online in the commercial sector can imagine the analogous excitement about this announcement for academic researchers.

Spock has been unleashed to those people who signed up early to be beta testers. I was one of those people having seen a presentation at the recent Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

Spock is a people search engine. It describes itself as “personal search, helping users find and discover people”. With over 100 million people indexed it’s seems to have fairly good start. I wasn’t in the seed list but my friend and fellow co-founder of the Mars Institute, Pascal Lee, was. It seems Spock went out and grabbed all the people from Wikipedia and used that to help seed their own search. However when I searched for another business partner in a different venture I came up with someone who had the same name but was not who I was looking for. To me this shows one of the problems Spock will have. What happens when there X number of matches for the same name? To help solve that problem Spock uses user input to tag people and to confirm if the tag is relevant. Very smart.

Spock is trying to get into a niche market that it thinks there is both a demand and need for. Tim O’Reilly described Spock as “really, really impressive. It’s thinking about whether there are other classes of data to which search hasn’t really been applied.”

There are challenges though, as I know as I’m working on my own vertical search platform, and to address these challenges Spock is trying a unique approach.

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Vertical health search is one area that I see growing fast over the next couple of years. So it comes as no surprise that a vertical search engine like Healia was snapped up by traditional publishing house Meredith yesterday. In fact the vertical health search segment is hot right now and I would not be surprised if more companies in this segment get snapped up including startup Kosmix Health.

On May 16 Google started to roll out it’s “Universal Search” system which aggregates results from across many of Google’s properties including images, video, news, blogs etc. And while the general public is just starting to see universal search show up on their searches, industry insiders have been able to see some of what Google has been up to on a public but not very publicized web site Searchmash.

As soon as Google rolled out the new service some analysts were saying that this could spell the doom of the vertical search market. Blogs posting title’s from some prominent blogs were provocative like these: Google Universal Search - is Vertical Search Space Finished? and Will Universal Search Mean Universal Domination?

So is the vertical search market doomed? No, and in a word here’s why, innovation.

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The other day I came across a posting on Search Engine Land about Pandia offering a vertical search called the Search Engine Detective. What a great idea. A vertical search or meta search engine if you that focuses on search engine related news. And while I appreciate the idea, the search itself is limited to 25 selected sources and what’s more it’s powered by Google’s Co-op.

Google Co-op is great project, for Google. if you aren’t familiar with Google Co-op here’s the official intro.

“Google Co-op is a platform that enables you to customize the web search experience for users of both Google and your own website.”

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