Nano2Sol by Marc Boucher

A lot of notable writers are touting 2008 as the year Vertical Search Engines really hit the mainstream. I’m a believer otherwise I wouldn’t be working on a vertical search platform.

Here’s some of the posts from the last couple of days;

From AltSearchEngines - 75 per cent of online publishers see vertical search as way to reclaim online community from Google

“Nearly three quarters of online publishers see the benefit of developing vertical search engines as a way to claw back online communities from Google, a study published last month has claimed.”

From John Battelle’s Blog - Blekko

“The web is big. Really, really big. It’s literally billions and billions of pages. It’s Carl Sagan big. And it’s doubling in size every year or two.

So the idea that what you can see in positions 1-3 above the fold on Google are the sum of what the web has to say about every possible query is crazy.

And yet they have 85%+ market share, and little effective competition. At the same time there is such a fabulous business in search. It’s the highest monetization service on the web, by far.”

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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.