Terrakon Blog

Google Trends are Fan-tastic.

I was just scanning my Google Friends Newsletter and found an interesting new tool in Google Labs. Google Trends allows you to see “what the world is searching for” on Google. Actually, the tool shows you not only what the world is looking for, but also allows you to drill-down further and see what a country or in some cases, even a city is searching for. For business owners, especially those with an on-line presence, the best feature is the ability to compare up to five words or phrases to see which ones are searched for most often on Google. (more…)

If you are frequent user of Google, here’s a resource you should check out. (more…)

You Never Know Who May Be Looking For You

I came across a new search engine called, VerticalSearch, – “the search engine for the b2b community.” While Google, Yahoo and MSN currently garner over 90% of the search market, I think we’ll start to see more and more vertical and local-specific search engines popping up.

VerticalSearch focuses specifically on the B2B community. From their About Us page:

“To begin with, we have indexed over 4,000 of the B2B trade press sites,
including many online -only publishers of B2B information. These sites
offer a wealth of content and editorial expertise in the whole range of
B2B verticals, from Agriculture to Mining, Construction to
Transportation. Soon we will be adding tens of thousands of B2B company
sites to augment the B2B trade press sites.”

You can submit your business site to the VerticalSearch search engine in less than two minutes with an easy online form.

A primary objective of VerticalSearch is to resolve a common frustration B2B information providers encounter-a lack of top rankings in the large, generalized consumer search engine results. My question, though, is will this search engine be successful – even if they address this frustration for B2B information providers?

As small business owners, aren’t most of us frustrated with how difficult it is to appear in the national top page rankings for the more popular keywords? Sure. But it’s not the content publishers (us) who drive the revenue for the search engines. The business or end consumers who use the search engines to find our products, services or ideas drive the revenue – advertising revenue. And for these folks, it’s all about search results relevancy.

For vertical search engines, like VerticalSearch, to be successful, they will have to build a better mousetrap – a search engine that will provide more relevant top 30 results than Google, Yahoo and MSN. That is a tall order.

Today, a quick search for “marketing consultant” on both Google and VerticalSearch shows the search engines are in different leagues right now. Google, for me, is much more relevant.

But it is still early for VerticalSearch. Perhaps they’ll significantly improve their algorithms enough that searching through a much smaller web universe will allow them to compete with the big search engines – we’ll see.