Two New Vertical Sites Tailor Web Searches, But Still Have Kinks
The big search engines like Google and Yahoo dominate the business of navigating the Internet. Millions of people start every Web session by typing a search term into these sites.
But coming up with search results tailored to your needs isn't so easy. Because these major search engines index a huge swath of the Web, and are designed to find almost anything, they are necessarily general in nature. In most cases, you'll get lots of irrelevant results.
So more and more companies see a market for what is called vertical search. These are search engines designed to help pluck only specific types of information from the Internet. They index only those sites likely to have that specific kind of information, and they use search queries tailored to their specialties.
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Walt Mossberg reviews two new vertical search engines, Ziggs and Indeed.com.
I've been testing two of the newest vertical search sites, both designed around people and work. Both have drawbacks, but they also have potential.
The first, called Ziggs , helps you find people with particular skills or other characteristics for hiring or networking purposes. For instance, it might help you find a lawyer in Washington specializing in international trade, or an alumnus of Brandeis University who lives in Delaware.
The second, called Indeed.com, is a search engine for jobs. Unlike traditional job sites, like Monster.com, Indeed indexes more than 500 Web sites (including Monster) that list job openings, and allows job seekers to search them all from one place. For instance, you can look for all jobs in Michigan, or all jobs at General Motors, or only job openings in Michigan for engineers at GM.
Ziggs , based in Boston, is technically in beta, or prerelease, status. But it is open for business to all Web users. It claims to be indexing about 2.3 million Web sites, and to include people who work at nearly 43,000 companies. When you locate a person with Ziggs , you mainly get whatever biography page has been posted about that person on his or her company's Web site.
If you aren't listed somewhere on the Web, Ziggs allows you to create a detailed profile that will pop up whenever anyone searches for your name, or for other characteristics that match your profile. You can even include a photo, a favorite quotation and a canned "interview" based on questions Ziggs supplies.
Ziggs is free for searchers. There will be a $25 annual fee to be listed in Ziggs , though it's free for the first year. For $50 a year, Ziggs will also buy an ad on the big search sites like Google designed to make your name pop up in the paid listings that run alongside search results.
Ziggs worked all right in my tests, but it has some flaws. It's pretty slow, which is probably due to its beta status. And it seems to be aimed more at helping people and companies promote themselves than at providing comprehensive information. Ziggs search results provide only neutral or flattering biographies, not information that might warn you away from a person.
And there are odd holes in its database. Ziggs had nothing for the executives of some companies I tried, even though their profiles are listed in open Web sites. Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, was listed properly as being in Redmond, Wash., the company's headquarters. But he also popped up as being located in Cincinnati.
Indeed.com, based in Stamford, Conn., is also in beta, but it was polished and speedy. It lists job openings by city, title, company name and key word. It retrieves these openings from job sites, newspaper-ad sites, and corporate and association sites.
Unlike standard job sites, Indeed doesn't post résumés, and it doesn't charge searchers anything. Indeed also doesn't accept money to include job postings in its listings. It is simply a one-stop shop for job seekers. It plans to make money by selling ads.
Indeed claims to have 100,000 new jobs every day. In my tests, I was easily able to locate job openings for both white-collar and blue-collar workers all over the country. For instance, I found jobs for a drywall foreman in New Bedford, Mass.; a radiologist in Ottumwa, Iowa; and a videographer in Sacramento, Calif.
The service includes some nice extra features, all free. You can set up an e-mail alert service to notify you once a day of new jobs that meet your criteria. You can e-mail pages of job-search results to friends. And you can even post a constantly updating feed of search results to a Web page like My Yahoo.
But, as with Ziggs , there are some flaws in Indeed.com. Many of my test searches included duplicate entries for the same job, inflating the number of job results Indeed claimed to produce. Also, when I clicked on many of Indeed's results to read the actual postings, I found they had expired or had been withdrawn. And, in some cases, Indeed's results included listings from people seeking jobs, not offering them.
Also, Indeed's search results were often too vague. A search for "screenwriter" in California turned up postings for office assistants, movie producers and even someone to remove a computer virus -- but none for actual screenwriters.
Still, both Ziggs and Indeed provide interesting, focused information that would be hard to find as quickly or precisely on Google or Yahoo. Vertical search sites like these show real promise, if they can get the kinks out.
为你量身定做的垂直搜索网站
像Google和雅虎(Yahoo)这样的大型搜索引擎主宰著互联网浏览业务。数以百万计的人们都是通过在这些网络上键入一个搜索词汇来开始每一次网络冲浪的。
但要找到正好符合你要求的搜索结果可不那么容易。由于这些主要的搜索引擎对大量网页进行索引，而且其设计的意图就是要找到尽可能多的结果，因此它们必然都包罗万象。在大多数情况下，你会得到许多毫不相干的结果。
因此，越来越多的公司认为一个被称为垂直搜索的市场商机无限。它们是旨在帮助搜集互联网上某些特定类别信息的搜索引擎。这些搜索引擎仅对那些可能拥有某种特定类别信息的网站进行索引，而且它们运用为其专门量身定做的搜索问题。
我一直在对两个最新的垂直网站进行测试，它们是专攻个人和工作的信息。两个网站都有缺陷，但也具有潜力。
第一个叫做Ziggs，它能帮助你找到具有特殊技能或其他特点的人，适合以雇佣或交友为目的的搜索者。比如说，它可以帮你找到一位在华盛顿工作的专攻国际贸易的律师，或者是一个现居特拉华州的布兰迪斯大学(Brandeis University)的校友。
第二个叫做Indeed.com，它是一个招聘搜索引擎。与Monster.com等传统的招聘网站不同，Indeed对超过500个列有求职信息的网站（包括Monster)进行索引，允许求职者搜索符合某一类要求的所有招聘信息。比如说，你可以寻找密歇根州的所有求职信息，或者通用汽车(General Motors)的所有工作机会，或者仅仅是通用汽车在密歇根州的工程师职位招聘信息。
ZIGGS总部位于波士顿，这个搜索引擎目前还处于测试阶段。但是它对所有的互联网用户开放业务。Ziggs声称检索的网站数量大约为230万个，并包括在近4.3万家公司工作的个人。当你在Ziggs上寻找一个人的时候，你搜索到的主要是他/她公司网站上刊登的关于这个人的简介网页。
如果你在互联网上并未登记资料，Ziggs可以让你创建一个详细的个人介绍，只要有人搜索你的名字，或是搜索和你的简介相符的其他特点，有关你的资料就会被检索出来。 你甚至可以附上一张照片，自己喜欢的一句话，或是一个根据Ziggs提供的问题预先制作的“专访”。
Ziggs对搜索者免费开放。登记资料需要每年缴纳25美元的费用，但第一年是免费的。每年花上50美元，Ziggs将在Google等大型搜索引擎上购买一个广告，让你的名字在和搜索结果一起出现的付费名单上显示出来。
在我的测试中，Ziggs的功能很不错，但也有一些缺点。也许是因为它还处于测试阶段，Ziggs的速度相当慢。而且，它的目的似乎更多地在于帮助人们和公司推销自己，而不是提供全面的信息。Ziggs的搜索结果只提供中性或自我吹捧的个人资料，而不是那些可能告诫你远离某个人的信息。
另外，它的数据库也存在一些奇怪的漏洞。Ziggs没有我曾试著搜索的一些公司管理人士的资料，即便他们的资料在公开的网站上就有。微软公司(Microsoft)首席执行长巴尔默(Steve Ballmer)的工作地点被正确地列在公司总部华盛顿州雷蒙德，但他同时也出现在辛辛那提。
INDEED.COM总部位于康涅狄格州斯坦福，也处于测试阶段，但它经过改进，速度很快。该网站按城市、职位、公司名称和关键词等不同类别显示就业信息。它从招聘网站、报纸广告网站和公司及附属网站调出这些招聘信息。
与标准的招聘网站不同，Indeed不刊登个人简历， 也不向搜索者收费。将招聘信息登记在Indeed的搜索清单中也是免费的。它就是一个面向求职者的一站式商店。Indeed计划通过出售广告获取收入。
Indeed声称每天有10万个新职位登记在册。在我的测试中，我能够很容易地找到全美白领和蓝领的求职信息。比如说，我在马萨诸塞州新贝德福德找到了一个清水墙工头的职位；在艾奥瓦州奥塔姆瓦找到了一个放射线学者职位；在加利福尼亚州萨克拉门托找到了一个电视录像制作人的职位。
Indeed还有一些很好的附加功能，而且都是免费的。你可以设置一个电子邮件提示服务，每天通知你一次符合你标准的新职位。你可以通过电子邮件将职位搜索结果发送给朋友。此外，你甚至可以在诸如我的雅虎(My Yahoo)这样的网页上显示不断更新的搜索结果。
但和Ziggs一样，Indeed.com也存在一些缺陷。我的许多测试搜索包括了对同一份工作的重复输入，从而虚增了Indeed声称可以提供的职位数量。另外，当我点击Indeed的许多搜索结果想阅读实际内容的时候，我发现它们已经过期了或者是被撤掉了。而在某些情况下，Indeed的搜索结果包含的是求职者、而不是招聘人员发布的信息。
此外，Indeed的搜索结果通常都过于模糊。我想在加州找一位电影剧本作家的职位，结果却显示办公室助理、电影制片人甚至是消除电脑病毒专家的职位，但都不是真正的电影剧本作家。
尽管如此，Ziggs和Indeed都提供了在Google和雅虎上难以很快找到的有趣和集中的信息。如果这类垂直搜索网站能够改掉设计中的缺陷，它们就会显示出真正的发展前景。
