Search Boutiques

When my mother, my wife, and my ten year old both use Google as a verb (as in, “I Googled it”) it is a pretty safe bet that Google won the search war.  Even though the big war has been fought, have you noticed the many little skirmishes are still going in the bushes on the edge of battlefield?  Specialized search domains are different than searching the web and all the big players readily admit that.  This is why there is still a ripe market in building search engines to be acquired by Google.

Driving the need for these specialized search solutions, or search boutiques, is that the domains being searched are highly specialized.  Google got its chops because it can search the web really well.  This doesn’t mean the same techniques for web search will help a user find the right information to help her find a doctor.  For instance, maybe the closest doctor shown on Google maps just happens to be under indictment.

Here are a few for you to think about.

1. Healthline
   Specializing in health information and helping lay people find it, Healthline uses a big taxonomy like the ones we find in the UMLS.  SnoMed, ICD, CPT, and other coding systems are examples of lexicons that are used in medical informatics and Healthline has slapped a great UI on top of this model.
   
2. Pluggd
   I have a friend who works for Pluggd and therefore admit to a certain prejudice for it’s technology.  Basically, Pluggd  lets you search for podcasts by typing in words that you are interested in hearing.  OK, it may be a bit more complex than that, but the idea is that I can type in Florida Marlins and get hits in the form of podcasts that have mentioned the Florida Marlins recently.  This smells like a Yahoo acquisition if I ever smelled one.
   
3. Technorati
   A classic example of the search boutique genre, Technorati scans RSS feeds and catalogs the content for retrieval.  Now that Google does the same thing, many wonder how Technorati will distinguish itself.

Of course there is the standard mix of enterprise search solutions brought by companies promising to make every conceivable file format precisely recalled by mind control.  Verity, Share Point, Ultra Seek, and Google are all players in this crowded and over-valued space.