Google’s Hidden Talent

We’ve all surprised our friends with some random talent we have at some point. I guess I never realized that companies can do the same thing. Yesterday I was browsing through Google and found some “Specialty Search Engines” that they have released. They have U.S. Government, Linux, BSD, Apple Macintosh, and Microsoft search engines available.

So what’s really going on here? I’m not sure, but there are a few successful vertical search engines out there such as SimplyHired (job search engine) and OmniMedicalSearch (medical search engine). It is possible that Google has their own on the back burner in case these types of search engines gain traction.

These specialty search engines can be useful because you can get a lot less results with much higher relevance. If you search on the Mac topic search engine for “Mac” you get 174,000,000 results, while if you search Google.com for “Mac” then you end up with 1,450,000,000 results. This would be one immediate benefit of using a vertical search engine, but I’m still partial to only worrying about one search spot. I suppose that if I was really motivated on one topic then I might choose to use a vertical search engine.

Google base is a good example of how to really focus-in on something specific. This type of search allows you to input criteria in an advanced search mode and obtain specific results. I see this taking the whole concept of vertical search engines one step further and would probably use something like this to find a house or apartment. This is definitely one application where specific results really come into their own.

One more noteworthy thing about the specialty Google search engines is that although results are topic-specific, ads are not. I searched on the Microsoft topic based search engine for “Windows” and ended up with some ads for home windows and vinyl windows. I guess that could be another step for these types of search engines, but apparently it isn’t a priority at this point.

Overall, it’s interesting to see that Google has something like this. At this point it is difficult to tell whether or not these are remnants of something Google was doing in the past or just a placeholder for now. The entire search industry has yet to show us where it is going, but these types of things could certainly be one direction. After all, the whole idea is to get more relevant results and more relevant ads.

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Gabriel, April 23, 2006

At this point it is difficult to tell whether or not these are remnants of something Google was doing in the past or just a placeholder for now.

remnants. Check those web archive sites. In the first years, google had upgraded the logo+searchbox page with a list of those itens. Don’t recall to see apple there… just gov, linux, ms and bsd