As the saying goes, "birds of a feather flock together," and now search engines must also enter middle age with the maturity of the market. Accurate positioning has become an inevitable trend for search engines, and vertical search has become another hot topic in the world of search. Vertical search engines are focused on a particular industry and serve a group of people with specific needs. This feature determines the community behavior of vertical search. People use vertical search engines to solve problems and share feedback. Nowadays, websites emphasize community building, so vertical search engines essentially provide a simplified integration of information from vertical portals. Moreover, vertical search engines are not just a simple text box and button that can do everything; they require professional information support and value-added content, which is a secondary "processing" of related content. This is precisely what Google and Baidu cannot offer.
Firstly, let's talk about the basic principles of vertical search engines. Vertical search engines target specific fields such as books, recruitment, shopping, blogs, news, etc., all of which are potential areas for vertical search. Imagine if there were very convenient book vertical search engines or news vertical search platforms online, then going online would no longer be aimless. Currently, many industry portals are thriving, and the model of vertical search engines itself is a good portal site. For example, when a netizen has information needs in a specific field or industry, if one professional vertical search engine can accurately lock down the content but the volume is relatively small, while another can retrieve a large amount of content but much of it is "garbage" and it’s hard to find relevant information, which one would you choose? If a user wants to read a novel, would they go to a dedicated e-book search engine like isoshu or search on Google or Baidu? If you want to find a job, would you go to a specialized job search engine or search on Baidu? The answer is obvious; more users would abandon the latter, even though the former may have a smaller brand and reputation, but the results often matter most to netizens.
Secondly, where is the threshold for vertical search engines? In the internet world, talking about thresholds means comparing resources. It’s the same with vertical search; whether it can provide comprehensive and authoritative industry information and whether it can own industry resources is the threshold for the development of vertical search engines. In other words, vertical portals are the closest relatives of vertical search. For example, as an e-book search engine, iSoshu is also a vertical portal. It not only provides all-round precise e-book searches but also offers readers a comprehensive reading service: including a platform for the latest, fastest, and best-selling book information. As long as a reader who loves reading comes to this platform, they won’t be aimless because this platform includes multiple classification channels. Want to see something? Just go in directly and it will be clear at a glance. If you still don't know what you need to read, then there are daily book recommendations from editors serving this platform. Without doubt, these are currently the most popular, best-selling, and highest-read books. Randomly choosing a book will make you unable to put it down. Besides the book information platform, there is also a dedicated reading software called eREAD. This software inherits all the functions of traditional readers and adds a powerful function called "easy reading." So-called easy reading means that as long as you want to read a book through the eREAD reader, you can read it directly and save it for collection, saving time for readers to find books and increasing interest in reading. Finally, there is e-book creation, with the format being "STK." The richness of resources on the internet benefits from the pleasure of resource sharing among netizens. Having an excellent e-book maker can also accelerate the popularity of STK e-books on the network, naturally solving the threshold problem of vertical search—resource issues. Such a series of services can only be achieved by vertical search, its focus, specificity, and depth are sufficient to meet the needs of readers.
In the market, certain niche markets usually ignored by large enterprises are known as niche markets. A niche market strategy refers to a company occupying these markets through specialized operations, thereby maximizing profits. Vertical search is also the niche of the search market. The significance of the niche lies in: companies engaging in market niches actually fully understand their target customer groups, thus enabling them to better and more perfectly meet consumer needs than other companies. Furthermore, market niche players can gain reputation and good reviews based on the other services they provide, thereby attracting more users.