Search Engines of the Future

Another method in which engineers and designers are controlling the ever-expanding Web is by making it smaller, or at least narrower, in various ways. Vertical search engines work to decrease the expansiveness of the Web by making the search subject more specific. If you want to go shopping, for instance, specific search engines narrow the field by filtering out irrelevant results. Another vertical search engine, GlobalSpec, will go deep into the Web and produce results not otherwise available. Not only does GlobalSpec use human editors to identify about 100,000 sites, but it crawls parts of the “invisible Web,” which is one of the targets of many search-of-the-future projects. GlobalSpec includes databases that are not accessible via standard search engines because they include subscriber-based materials that are not available to the general public.

John Battelle, cofounding editor of Wired magazine, founder of The Industry Standard, and author of Search, calls GlobalSpec a “domain specific search engine” and notes that because it deals with a narrow field and a smaller domain, it is able to get better results with simpler queries. Additionally, it is able to return results on subjects related to the query. Battelle suggests that one future for search engine applications is a world in which more subjects will become the subject of vertical searches, and then a major search engine provider such as Google will become the metasearch engine that will crawl those vertical search results.