Vertical search refers to search engines designed to return results from very narrow or specific information or business sectors. Search tools that focus on a tight regime of information have existed for years. There are plenty of examples that already exist such as the highly successful book-search engine, AbeBooks.com, or the various job and career search engines like Monster.com. Name a business sector and you can likely find a search tool designed specifically for that sector. Vertical search is not a new idea however branding it as an essential type of search engine is. To quote the respected blogger, Om Malik , “You can’t go two steps on Sand Hill Road , the epicenter of venture capital without some money man espousing the virtues of vertical search.” Read more…

Google has purchased San Diego based web analytics firm Urchin for an undisclosed amount of cash and/or stock. Urchin is a web site analysis tool that allows users to study the habits of site visitors in order to get a better view of what they are doing when they visit a particular site. Understanding the experiences of site visitors allows webmasters to track the performance of their websites and better optimize content to meet the wants and needs of those visitors. Currently, Urchin tools are available as hosted services (run from Urchin.com), software packages (run from user’s computer), or as the default site-stat service offered by many larger ISPs. Read more…

Mirroring last year’s rounds of conglomeration in the search engine industry, the search engine marketing (SEM) sector is seeing a round of mergers, acquisitions and newly minted partnerships. Read more…

The first three months of 2005 is turning out to be a cursed quarter for the PR department at the Googleplex. This week, the public spotlight focused on Google News for two less-than-honourable mentions. Read more…

Yahoo has been on an upgrading spree recently with a major acquisition, two major upgrades and a beta-release of a new blogging tool. It’s no secret the execs and techs at Yahoo have been working overtime to re-brand and upgrade Yahoo’s various services. Yahoo has made several major announcements over the past four weeks, a measure of how active they have been recently. Here is a quick rundown of the four major announcements made in the past seven days. Read more…

Search Engine Watch receives regular statistics on search engine usage from Neilson Net Ratings. Neilson Net Ratings gathers data from over one million Internet users in the United States with Neilson software installed on their home and work computers that records every site visited. Measuring three unique metrics, these stats provide a present and historic view of search engine usage. Read more…

Ask Jeeves has been sold to Internet media conglomerate InterActiveCorp (IAC) for nearly $2-billion. Rumours about the sale, which started circulating early Sunday with a short story in the Wall St. Journal, were confirmed this morning by both IAC and Ask Jeeves. The transaction, which is worth $1.85-billion in stocks, represents the largest search related sale in the past two years.

Ask Jeeves has had a strange history. Starting as a natural language search engine that attempted to match specific questions with precise answers, they quickly moved to being a keyword-triggered search engine. Their famous mascot, Jeeves the Butler has served the firm for most of its life, with a brief retirement four years ago, and is one of the annual attendees (in hot-air balloon format) in New York’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Jeeves stands in front of Teoma, the brains behind Ask Jeeves. Generally regarded as one of the best algorithmic search tools available, Teoma (which is owned by Ask Jeeves) provides the search results displayed by Ask Jeeves. If it wasn’t for Google’s hold on name-brand popularity, Teoma might well have emerged as the #1 search engine. Ask.Com has been rumoured to be working on a paid-performance search tool to rival Yahoo and Google. The purchase also includes Ask Jeeves brand properties, Excite, Ask.com, and iWon.Com.

IAC owns a number of Internet businesses including the popular online travel business Expedia, which it plans to spin off sometime this year. It also owns the Home Shopping Network, Hotels.com, Citysearch Web Directory, Ticketmaster, and the online mortgage provider LendingTree. The acquisition of Ask Jeeves gives IAC an entry into the rapidly growing search engine market with ownership of the world’s fourth most popular search service.

Earlier this month, IAC indicated it would purchase Cornerstone Brands, a massive Internet and catalogue retailer for a rumoured $720-million. Ownership of Cornerstone would give IAC further entry into the consumer retail market with a wider variety of products and services.

The purchases of Ask Jeeves and Cornerstone Brands, combined with IAC’s already heavy ownership of several sector-specific search services raises concerns that Ask Jeeves will be transformed into a vehicle for IAC vertical content, to the exclusion of other search options. From a business perspective, it would make sense for travel searches to return Expedia-generated results. Ask Jeeves CEO, Steve Berkowitz commented that the merger will permit users to “search, find and complete a task all within the boundaries of one company.” From a search perspective however, such a move would likely backfire as it did for Lycos two years ago.

Investors welcomed the purchase, with Ask Jeeves shares climbing 14% at the opening of trading today. Increased confidence in Ask Jeeves might be attributed to other moves IAC and its CEO, Barry Diller have made lately. Diller has long been known as an entrepreneur willing to spend large sums of money to buy big-ticket websites selling directly to the consumer. His strategy appears to be working. Last month, IAC announced sales of $6.2-billion across its stable of websites in 2004, a 15% increase over 2003 sales. This morning, IAC also announced the opening of a gift-recommendation search engine as a competitor to Amazon called Gifts.com.

By combining its various services under the same URL, “Ask Jeeves”, IAC is betting online consumers will naturally migrate to the place that offers everything, “…within the boundaries of one company.” It currently owns many of the Internet’s most active web properties, some of which have been operating since before the tech-crash five years ago. They are most certainly anticipating a migration of search users towards sector-specific “vertical” search tools such as Gifts.com, Hotels.Com and whatever comes from their pending purchase of Cornerstone. Ask Jeeves and IAC had already jointly entered the local-search market with IAC’s Citysearch powering Ask Jeeves’ local search option.

Die-hard baseball fans have spent the past few days watching heavy hitters like Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire testify in front of a US Congressional sub-committee about the use of steroids in baseball. That the world of professional athletes is deeply enmeshed with performance enhancing drugs use is not really a shock for most people. Compounding their need to perform as well or better than their competitors, there are tremendous commercial and financial pressures placed on athletes in our culture. Read more…

Understanding the value of global communications, nearly every organized organization in the world has a website. From grassroot community groups to major corporations, the World Wide Web has expanded by billions of websites over the past half decade. Because the medium is easy, cheap and absurdly flexible, it has become the backbone of a “people’s global communications network”. Read more…

According to dozens of Google-watchers, Google’s ad-driven email system, Gmail is slated to move from beta to live-status on Friday April 1st, one year after it was introduced to a limited number of testers. On its first day, many thought Gmail was an April Fool’s joke.

To establish the initial beta-test group, Google issued a number of initial invitations to a very small group of users that day. It also sent each of those users six invitations to send to friends who where also issued six invitations with their beta account. Gmail grew its potential test group by a factor of six every time it gave away a new beta-account. For the past two weeks, Google has been randomly inviting users of its search engine to sign up for Gmail accounts with a discreet link that appears for about 1 in 100 users. Read more…