What is Vertical Search?
Kara Toedtli | 6 March 2006 |
Vertical search engines are specialty search engines aimed at visitors interested in a particular area while enabling advertisers to target focused audiences. Because of the stranglehold that the major search engines have on the general market, new entrants have created vertical search engines. Vertical search engines generally contain information in their indexes about a specific topic. Categories in vertical search include travel, jobs, doctors, and real estate, just to name a few.
Travel search engines focus on bringing comparison shopping capabilities to consumers searching for travel deals. Sidestep, Mobissimo, Kayak.com and Dohop.com are just a few of the vertical search engines available for the travel market. According to an Infoworld article, “Travel search engines function differently from the big online booking agencies such as Expedia,Orbitz,Travelocity, Opodo, etc. Travel search engines take a much different approach. They present users with results from multiple Web sites — including online agencies, consolidators and travel suppliers. The consumer then buys directly from the site on which the deal was found, as opposed to buying from the search engine company.”
For more information about vertical search engines, view the whole Infoworld article here.
Kara Toedtli - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.
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March 16th, 2006 at 9:43 pm
It is worth noting that the vertical search engines listed above offere limited opportunity for markting your lodging website… they are typically available only to hotels that participate in GDS and online distrubution (Sabre, Hotels.com, Expedia, etc).
These website are good if you are a consumer looking for discounts. If you are a hotel operator looking to shop your competitors and compare pricing, try travelaxe.com.
January 23rd, 2007 at 9:04 am
Another great tool for getting the best air fares is Trabber. I does automatically browse multiple online travel agencies and airline websites.