For my first post in 2008 I've decided to write a little note about opportunities for vertical search platforms such as the one we're developing at Hyperix.
I've said for years now that while the big search engines do a great job for some things they do poorly at others and that many opportunities exist for those who go the vertical search route as a business model. There's a lot of data out there that can be made into a business product. Today Tim O'Reilly on the O'Reilly Radar wrote about one such opportunity for vertical search in the finance sector in his piece "Predicting Financial Market Performance with Real Time Web Data". To quote Tim;
A few days ago, I wrote that one lesson from Wall Street suggests that Google and other Web 2.0 giants will increasingly start "trading for their own account." The same history of Wall Street firms suggests that there will be many new opportunities for specialized information services that supplement the services that are no longer provided by the search engines themselves.
So how does Hyperix fit into this picture? We're developing a platform, one that we'll use to create various data products in sectors we feel there's a business model or that we can penetrate into. Finance is one such sector but it's not the only one. Because of my involvement in the Space sector I see opportunities there as well as the Biotech sector. So we'll focus on those three niches to start with. But there's no reason for us not to use our crawling and data mining tools for other sectors should potential partners approach us.
In short, there is a new economy of specialized trend tracking and data mining companies that is growing up in the shadow of the search engines and other Web 2.0 applications.
I couldn't agree more.