The other day I came across a posting on Search Engine Land about Pandia offering a vertical search called the Search Engine Detective. What a great idea. A vertical search or meta search engine if you that focuses on search engine related news. And while I appreciate the idea, the search itself is limited to 25 selected sources and what's more it's powered by Google's Co-op.
Google Co-op is great project, for Google. if you aren't familiar with Google Co-op here's the official intro.
"Google Co-op is a platform that enables you to customize the web search experience for users of both Google and your own website."
There's nothing like getting free labour to create vertical search projects for you and watch the results as they mature. By this I mean Google is harnessing the power of individuals and groups of people to create vertical search categories for them. In doing so they can see analyze the topics, patterns and usage to create future products, for Google. And all of this labour and data is being provided for free.
There is however some value here for vertical search engine companies though. They can analyze what information Google makes available through the co-op site to help them in their businesses, albeit as I said before, only what Google makes public.
It will be interesting to see what happens over time with Google Co-op and what products mature from it. I know I'll be keeping an eye on it as I move forward with Project Phoenix. More information on that project in a future posting.