The Fear of Search ?. Review on Bixee

For a few months, I have been monitoring the happenings in the vertical search space and especially on the progress of India focussed search engines. While most Indian sites and users have got used to the ''google'' way of doing things, many are still wary of trying out a new search product especially focussed on Indian contents. Indian sites are paranoid of ''another'' search engine controlling how users come to their site, while most indian internet users believe that google is the ''God of all things''.

Agreed that google has become the ''information powerhouse'' which even the governments fear, and that it remains to be seen how long google will stick to its ''Do no Evil'' slogan, it cannot also be denied that google has helped consolidate information from billions of pages which otherwise would have never seen the light. Any site serious of getting traffic in this jungle of information web needs to focus on Google SEO. Most users hardly would remember the name of sites they visited. (If you happen to take a list of all the domains you visited, how many can you remember ?). Most users search for the information they are looking for in google search and discover new domains that gave most relevant information and stick on to it.

Vertical searches like Bixee.com or India focussed search engines like Terrawiz.com can do to Vertical contents what google did to horizontal ones (i.e the websites). Google can help you discover sites that provide relevant information, but it may not always get you that information. for e.g when you search for ''admin jobs in mumbai'', google will throw out results that contain sites or webpages that may have reference to the jobs in mumbai. However search engines like Bixee gives out the snippets of just the job listings from most of the indian jobs and company sites and helps you decide on the jobs most relevant to the ones you are searching for. Thus a Vertical search engines can help to dig out information deep within a website which many users might otherwise had never found out. This would also help the website gain prominence since users will have the impression that it was the source of most relevant content.

The growth of all the vertical search engines like indeed.com, simplyhired.com, kosmix.com, bixee.com, terrawiz.com etc indicates that many users find the search tools highly useful to tackle the information overload thats happening on the net. Localization or Specialization is new mantra. Indian users are no exception to it given the growth of sites like bixee which is now in to top 50K in alexa rankings.