Search still drives the World Wide Web. In July, 2007, there were over 13 billion searches conducted across the Web. Of those searches, nearly one-third were not conducted using what would be considered a universal search engine. Vertical search is changing the landscape.

There is no denying that Google has transformed the Web. In 1997, as I sat next to a close confidant in Santa Clara, California amid a cube farm that was, then Yahoo!, we pondered the future of search engines. What was to become of the fractional search market and who would gain supremacy among the elite search engines Yahoo!, Alta Vista, and Lycos? Evaluating the landscape and with clear and unabashed bias, my confidant confidently declared victory for Yahoo!. The arguments were well founded and the issues facing the competition made the case compelling. The problem with the argument was that the landscape was about to change because of a little known technology company called Google who had developed very fast algorithms for indexing the Web and providing search results at lightning speed. Further, my friend at Yahoo! never contemplated the vertical search market and its impact.

Fast forward. As the Web has evolved, so has search. Search means more than going to a search engine and putting terms in the search box for entries that might appear throughout cyberspace. Today, search is YouTube. Search is MySpace; and search is Facebook, Ebay, Amazon, Craig’s List, and many others. Search has been redefined.

In a July 2007 ComScore release, ComScore announced that YouTube delivered results for over 1 billion searches. Google (6.4 billion), Yahoo! (2.5 billion), and Microsoft (1.2 billion) still held the majority of all search results, but other universal search engines were much farther behind YouTube (1 billion), MySpace (557 million), and Ebay (472 million). Search engines such as Ask.com (462 million) fell behind. While the big three search engines aren’t ready to panic, there is clearly cause for concern, because behind the raw numbers are growth rates for vertical search engines, that, on average, are double the growth rates for universal search engines. ComScore’s inclusion of vertical search in its report is a significant development.

The recent agreement that public profiles within Facebook will now be indexed and made available throughout Google is indicative of Google’s need to capture vertical search in its results.

For media planners and buyers, the growth of vertical search is a plus. Google has been limited to text links, while many of the vertical search engines allow far more graphical integration. Vertical search engines also provide an elegantly simple method for reaching desired demographics. For example, GenXers and Millennials can likely be reached through Facebook and Craigslist, while Google doesn’t provide nearly as narrow a demographic reach.

As new vertical search engines grow, media buyers will find fertile land in which to plant seeds.