espite being coastally challenged (currently living in Philadelphia), Josh has been an active entrepreneur and investor in the Internet industry since its commercialization. In 1992, while he was a student at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Josh co-founded Infonautics Corporation – an Internet information company. In 1996, Infonautics went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange.
Google - The next vertical search engine?
Since First Round Capital has a few vertical search engines in our portfolio (Krugle - a search engine for developers; and Biggerboat - a search engine for entertainment), I've been spending a lot of time recently trying to understand the vertical search space.
What I've been most interested in, however, is Google's approach towards vertical search. While a lot of attention has been focused on the recently launched Google Co-op -- which allows Google users to create a search engine for a customized collection of content -- I think that not enough attention has been focused on their OneBox feature. I think Google OneBox is a pretty decent attempt to create vertical search functionality inside of Google web search.
If you're looking to book travel, you could go to vertical search engine like Kayak.com -- or you could just enter "PHL to SFO" in Google and you get a travel OneBox on top of your search results.
If you're looking to read books on global logistics, you could go to Amazon or Half.com -- or you could just enter "global logistics books" into Google and you get a book OneBox which lets you read the actual content from several books that discuss it.
Looking for news on the Iraq War? You could go to a news site or news search engine -- or you could just enter "Iraq War" into Google and get their top headlines.
Looking to research a stock (say Microsoft)? You could go to a financial search site like Hoovers or Quicken to get some info -- or you could enter MSFT into Google and get their finance OneBox.
Looking for a person? You could go to Switchboard, ZoomInfo or LinkedIn to do a person search. Or you could just type in someone's name and city in Google and get their phone number and even a map to their home.
Shopping for a product online? You could go to a price comparison engine like Shopping.com or Shopzilla -- or you could just enter the product into Google and get links to their product search results.
Looking for a place to eat? You could go to Zagat.com, DineSite or CitySearch -- or you could enter the restaurant name into Google and get complete information including reviews.
The list continues -- whether you are looking for pictures, Movie times, weather, a calculator, or medical information, Google has a vertical search OneBox to answer your question.
I think that vertical search engines can still succeed if they offer additional application-specific features/navigation that differ from traditional search-box functionality (like Krugle) or if they focus on syndicating their results across other sites (like Biggerboat). But Google's actions have real consequences for vertical search engines -- and I'm surprised that there has been more discussion around Google Co-op than Google OneBox. By implicitly determining a user's intent, Google is able to take standard queries and filter them to their vertically focused sub-sites. Am I missing something or does this have real impact on the vertical search space?
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