Is “Horizontal” Search Dated?
The bigger question, then, is how long “horizontal” search—search that “sees” a vast swath of the Web’s 182 million sites—can remain an attractive business model. Google’s humbling in the property sector indicates that the real threat is not from such Goliaths as Microsoft, but from a myriad of Davids—specialized search engines tailored to conduct “vertical” search tasks. Examples of these include restaurant reservations by OpenTable (OPEN), job hunting at Simply Hired, and online travel with sites like Orbitz (OWW) and Priceline (PCLN). These sites are not promoted explicitly as “search engines,” but that’s what they are; they also happen to execute transactions.
