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Understanding Google My Business & Local Search

Decline in Searches at Vertical Sites Giving Way to More Searches At Google & Bing

Comscore has an interesting post detailing a decline in “vertical search” (travel, local, product, jobs) queries for the first time in several years. This decline in searches at vertical sites has been mirrored by an attendant increase of share of searches at the general search sites.

From the article:

This trend is illustrated by the tremendous growth of non-search engine search entities during that time. In August 2011, of the 27 billion searches conducted on desktops in the United States, more than one-third occurred on non-search engines. Search on sites like Amazon, eBay, and Facebook has been growing faster than (and therefore gaining market share from) the core search engines for several years. But in the past year, this vertical search market actually contracted by 6% after several years of strong growth.

Vertical Search Giving Way to Core Search

He went on to conclude that with recent acquistions (like ITA and Zagat) and improved local and travel search results this trend is likely to continue:

As these user improvements manifest themselves in the search results and searchers have increasingly begun to rely on them for their more vertically-oriented search needs, we are finally beginning to see a significant shift in the market. Growth in vertical searches is now actually conceding ground to the core search engines in a reversal of the past few years.

Now, don’t go taking this as the beginning of the end of non-search entities. Their business is still alive and well and will continue to serve a critical function for specialized searching behavior. But increasingly, search engines are improving the quality of their results in a way that is helping to fill the void once created by searches with vertical intent.

What do you think? Will Google and Bing continue to grab share from other local & vertical sites as their search results improved? What does it portend for those sites?