Following on from my last KnewWorld post regarding the recent report by Dogpile and Infospace that showed that the major search engines deliver dramatically different results. A new report argues that without utilising the insight of editors and information specialists, consumer search engines will never deliver the search results a professional user needs.

The report said Google "hides the existence and the extent of relevant sources on most topics" by "burying the good sources that it does find within massive and incomprehensible retrievals." 

Perhaps this is why B2B publishers are beginning to realise that there is an opportunity to provide a better search experience for their online communities by using vertical search and the specialist insight of editors to define specific whitelists of key website, open source, blog and other content.  If the search is then limited across this expert "vertical slice" of the web, the search results will be better, and will assist the workflow of a professional user community.  If the professional user community start to use vertical search more than Google, the publisher may also find it allows an easier transition of revenues from print to online.  It will also allow the publisher to use the search logs to get inside the mind of its user community and identify new articles, events and seminars that may be of interest to them.