Vertical Search Engines

A vertical search engine searches a specific industry, topic, type of content (e.g., travel, movies, images, blogs, live events), piece of data, geographical location, and so on. It may help to think of vertical search as a search for a particular niche. Some of this content cannot be found, or is difficult to find, on general search engines. For this reason, the topic of vertical search is closely related to that of the deep Web. Be sure to visit the tutorial on The Deep Web for a fuller discussion of this topic.
To find a vertical search engine, you can use a general search engine and try to find a search site dedicated to a particular type of content, for example medical search, job search, and so on.

When to use a vertical search engine

• When your topic is focused on a specific topic, industry, content type, geographical location, language, etc.
• When you're having difficulty locating what you want on general, meta, or concept categorizing search engines

A few examples of vertical search engines

There are so many example out there on so many topics - it's endless! This page will list just a very few. Notice how some cover broad topics while others are of narrower interest.
Topical search engines

~ MedNar and PubMed
~ ScienceResearch.com and World Wide Science

Industry search engines

~ BizNar, the world of business
~ Industry Search, a search for industrial supplies limited to Australia and New Zealand
~ PaperPundit, searching the pulp and paper industry created with Google Custom Search
~ Stock Screener from Yahoo!

Image search engines

~ Picsearch
~ Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog
tip! A good source for more of these tools can be found in a 2008 posting on the ReadWriteWeb blog, Digital Image Resources on the Deep Web.

News search engines

~ Alltop
~ NewsNow

Blog search engines

~ Google Blog Search
~ Technorati

Full text books and articles

~ Google Book Search
~ Google Scholar
~ The Online Books Page
~ Project Gutenberg

Social Web real time search

~ Twitter Search and Twitscoop for Twitter content
~ FriendFeed Search for social networking activities