Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

So you’re asking yourself, what’s the difference between horizontal search and vertical search? Doesn’t everything just search?

Well, there are some very big differences when it comes to these two.

Vertical Search, also known as “specialty search”, is a search engine that only searches within niche categories or sites. If you are looking for a recipe, you might go to FoodieView. If you are looking for sports information, you might visit Aardvarksport. Or you could even make up your own search engine using Rollyo. With Rollyo, you pick out the sites you want searched and aggregate them into your own personal search engine. It will then only search the sites you specify, instead of the entire web.

Vertical search has many advantages over traditional horizontal search, in that it only searches specified sites for specified content. It’s not looking at the entire web at once and will only return results for that specific content area. The problem with vertical search, in many cases, is that they are manually updated. If a new site concerning sports or recipes comes out, the owners of the vertical search engine have to manually add that site to their indexing in order for the content to be added. They can avoid this by using the DMOZ.org or some other hierarchy of sites, but those often take weeks or months to update, in which time other sites have been created, etc. etc.

Horizontal search refers to the more traditional Google, Yahoo, and MSN. These search engines benefit from their lack of hierarchy, in that they don’t have to classify each site as Category A or Category B (even though some have started doing this with “Neighborhoods“). They have the disadvantage though, as mentioned above, in that they search everything. It doesn’t matter whether “chicken” was mentioned on a cooking site, sports site, clothing site, or amazon, it might come up in your search results.

So if you are looking for the best results possible, I would try both methods and find out for yourself where you think you can find the best information for you and your content area.