When we say that the search results of our vertical search engine are better than Google et al what we mean is that there is a “flavor” to the results. Our results will never be more comprehensive than theirs because we don’t index anywhere near the number of webpages that they do. A vertical search engine for a city of 100,000 people might well have less than 100,000 pages indexed as opposed to Googles 5 billion. Of couse, most people rarely delve down to the #818 result using Google, the point being that all those pages that Google has tend to obfuscate a lot of the pages that have real relevance.

What our vertical search engines give are “flavored results” - a search for “Beatles” using our Nanaimo search engine might find a connection between their original drummer and Nanaimo, or reviews of Beatles recordings done by people who were born in Nanaimo. It isn’t as if the major search engines don’t have these (fictional) pages indexed, it is just that they have too many pages indexed period, even a search for “nanaimo music reviews beatles” might find the relevant page at result #359 - in other words you would never ordinarily see it.

In fact, you might never know that the (fictional) reviewer was from Nanaimo as the relationship might not have been explicitly defined on the indexed page. The reason why it was deemed relevant enough to be indexed would have been due to the “intelligent crawlers” that decided the page was in fact relevant to Nanaimo and the general process will come in the next post.