Another blog was applauding Google Universal Search today and again I noticed several references to vertical search.  While I too have to congratulate Google on their universal approach to search, we should all be clear that Google Universal is anything but vertical search.  Google aggregates a myriad of different sources, not just different media types but broad topics across many silos, and they have been good at indexing them and making them available to searchers.  But Google Universal is far too broad in its subject matter—in fact it defines the term broad when it comes to search—to offer any of the merits of a true vertical search experience.  Vertical search is defined by what it does not offer as much as what it does.  Vertical search is the fastest growing tool for professional searchers and specialty publishers of content because it does not serve up broad subjects across multiple silos.  Vertical search defines an authoritative subset of web and proprietary content and intelligently indexes it against a vernacular from the industry.  What you don’t get is the fluff.  No link farms, no spamdexing, no click fraud, no 140 billion pages of irrelevant links.  What you do get is a concise page of organic results focused on one specialty.  And if it’s good vertical search you will also get related concepts and keyword disambiguation from a semantic back end.  But the universal term itself implies the opposite of vertical.  Universal is great for researching your next meal but not much help if you are trying to diagnose a patient who happens to be sitting in front of you.