Drill Down, Then Out; Vertical's Where It's At

It's always been relevancy that drives the efficacy of search - that's a no-brainer, and the reason Google is king of general search. But because that search is general, riffraff makes its way into the results, sometimes old riffraff, which is the very foundation for the rise of vertical, or niche, search engines.

brittle bone disease]. Google does a nice job of bringing up alternative and supplemental results, and the first few results are quite relevant. But note also a recently that three-quarters of American Internet users (100 million adults) inherently trust the source they've found online, without taking the time to vet the information. When I was in college, the Internet had just become a grand public experiment - Website directories were still in phonebook format then. Echoing what are now mainly the chief criticisms of Wikipedia, professors shunned any information that could only be found online. You didn't really know where it came from. And that risk is still there, even if to a lesser degree. The Internet is becoming, at least somewhat, self-correcting with the advent of user-generated media and search engines that can squirrel out subject-matter experts. But again, growth from here will be found in the gaps. Do another search for [brittle bone disease] at Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl Bookmark murdok: