Vertical Search Partnerships

Sapna Satagopan | June 05, 2007, 03:42 PM

Vertical Search Partnerships

Last week, Kosmix briefed Belis Aksoy, our auto analyst and me on their recent partnership with Autobytel. Earlier this year, Autobytel announced its launch of myride.com, an automotive vertical search site [The site still seems to be under construction]. They seem to have eventually partnered with Kosmix to power their auto search-thus tapping into Kosmix’s technology that has aggregated content including reviews and guides. Among classifieds, jobs and real estate have had some buzz on vertical search, but the auto category has revolved primarily around third-party sites [Our auto analyst covers trends here]

Focusing on Kosmix a bit, the vertical topics they aggregate content for are health, auto, travel, finance, politics and oddly enough, video games. What is particularly interesting though, is the focus on partnerships. Vertical search sites have long since stopped trying to compete with Google, focusing instead on trying to be a niche destination site, while some prioritize on powering publisher’s vertical search features. A recent briefing with Boorah.com [a restaurant review site] reiterates this trend among the tail categories as well. The site works fairly well as a destination site, but the strategy is strongly on powering newspaper sites with restaurant reviews [go here for Jupiter’s take on the online newspapers]. Boorah powers the review engine for Palo Alto Weekly and a few other bay area focused newspaper sites. I am pretty convinced that trying to build a destination site for restaurant reviews that competes with the Yelps and Zagats is difficult, although I do quite like Boorah's approach on their site. But partnerships will open doors beyond local newspaper sites.

Jupiter is looking at vertical search trends as well—watch out for reports on the evolution of vertical search sites and health search in the next few weeks.