Macvicar Consulting

Overview

While Google has  been one of the great success stories of the decade it has two key limitations - the accuracy, depth and relevance of its searches are only as good as the tagging and the taxonomy of the websites it is pointed at; and it only searches when spoken to.

  Specialist search engines  and customised monitoring services can fill those gaps by delivering more granular search results from  a prescribed set of proprietary databases and/or external websites.  They can also be programmed to generate  real-time or regular alerts to any changes in either the domains or databases they have been instructed to search. 

 While the use of these engines has largely been pioneered  by publishers and other information providers, they are increasingly being deployed by B2B suppliers to deliver  more precise information about their  products and services.

The global market for B2B vertical search was estimated  at $518m in 2007. As a rule of thumb this application should account for 1-3% of a typical B2B publisher's revenues. 

 Business Models

 High-subscription, account-managed information monitoring services collating and filtering customised news streams from a range of  external websites and internally held archives. The information is delivered automatically to a client's desktop, mobile or other PDA.

This model is also ideally suited to professional institutions and other membership bodies with a mandate to keep their members up to speed with best practice, legislative and regulatory changes in their field.

 Dynamically restructured directory databases supported by "Yellow-Pages" - style enhanced listing and page ranking revenue; essentially an on-line model of the traditional print directory business that builds on existing brand awareness.

 Product portals that operate on the same principle but  rely more  on SEO-driven traffic than on brand awareness to generate revenue.

Collaborative hubs, where suppliers in the same sector join forces to create a critical mass and allow each other's customer base to compare products and prices. The ROI comes from increased sales rather than advertising.

USPs

 Saves end users time and effort accessing the correct information by cutting out internet "static".

 Helps all types of businesses to market their products and services more accurately and cost-effectively by attracting a higher proportion of relevant queries and reducing on-line "pay per click" advertising expenditure on irrelevant ones.

 Gives publishers the opportunity to leverage their two most valuable assets - their information streams and archives,  and their customer/client databases.