Specialty Search Sites Bloom | eweek

Specialty Search Sites Bloom

Specialty business-to-business Web sites have been gathering and categorizing content on specific industries and topics since the late 1990s. The major search engines also have created some targeted search categories, said Nate Elliott, an analyst with Jupiter Research, a division of Jupitermedia Corp., in New York. Google, for example, has sites where users can search on specific topics such as universities, Linux and Microsoft. It appears to be filtering its broader Web search results, Elliott said.

Few B2B sites, though, have created their own Web indexes of a specific set of Web sites, he said. B2B sites that draw from general Web search tend to more closely filter the results to match their topics or industries.

"In some cases, it makes a lot of sense," Elliott said. "If it's very technical information, for example, where there's a lot of noise in traditional search engines, then a specialty search engine might give you more targeted results."