Customised homepage systems like iGoogle, NetVibes and desktop environments such as Vista enable users to easily create work and personal tabs that can be populated by the user selecting appropriate widgets. This trend is accelerating due to audiences gaining familiarity with using widgets via social networks like Facebook.



This example shows how an engineer might use various GlobalSpec, widgets, including vertical search widgets, to provide a highly efficient in-browser working environment.



GlobalSpec are an online only publisher and as well as having a central website, they use widgets to create distribution mechanisms for specialised sub-sets of their data.



As well as offering a widget for their editorially vetted “best of the web” for unstructured open web content – called “The Engineering Web”, they also have widgets giving search across specialised structured databases using parametric search. This is something Google and Yahoo can’t do.

As a part of our service, Convera provide a range of ready made, easily branded widgets, toolbars and search boxes to help publishers to embed themselves into their audience’s habitual daily workflow.



In addition, as more and more people work with small screen mobile devices, space-efficient widgets may be increasingly used by professionals as a standard way to access information.

“Search Optics” is an alpha application for one of our science publishing partners targeting the 100,000+ global community of scientists who use laser and optical equipment.



Here is an example search for “wavelength” showing the top seven results comparing “Search Optics” to Google.



You can create a superior search experience that your time pressed target community will relate to.



Imagine if 20% of the 100,000 laser optics scientists start doing 10 work related queries a day on “Search Optics”……such a focused demographic will be valuable for advertisers. The growth of behavioural targeting and web analytics is giving media planners and buyers greater transparency and publishers more accountability.

You will be aware of Software as a Service (SaaS), such as Salesforce.com and the growing buzz around Cloud or Utility Computing.



Convera offer Search as a Service and have invested in creating 24/7 Tier 1 datacentres, with extensive telecommunications infrastructures for Web crawling. On top of this platform sits Convera’s semantically engineered Web search engine.



Connecting to this is a self-service portal that allows publishers to create and manage their custom vertical search solutions – with rapid deployment customizable templates for the UI, fully reporting and analytic tools, an integrated ad server, full crawl control on the search scope, and a range of other easy to use capabilities.



Publishers can embed the interface of Convera’s Publisher Control Panel into their own workflows and create an engine that powers on-line editorial and advertising processes around it.

Hopefully I have demonstrated how vertical search can help publishers to increase Web traffic find additional revenue opportunities – please email me, hand me your business card at the bar or poke me on Facebook ( 'Andy Black', I have an open profile) if you would like to arrange a meeting.



Thank you and goodnight.

Some publishers see vertical search as an additional revenue opportunity. More than half of online advertising spend goes to search marketing and these days most advertisers get search marketing and already use it with the major search engines.



Industry advertisers appreciate the combination of clean, focused demographics offered by specialist publishers, together with the ability to target advertising based on search keywords.

So lets add a bit more detail: The Publisher Control Panel requires no specific IT or other new skills to easily configure the application to the needs of the target community. This includes choosing a design template, adding the publisher’s own branding, and configuring the scope of the search, using existing knowledge of the target audiences’ needs.



Amongst other things, this can include using community bookmarks, simple categorization tabs, and customizing a few important ranking criteria to match the needs of the community. For example, is the newness of documents rather more important than popularity for the application? Such adjustments take less than a minute via a simple dashboard that controls the vertical search application



Convera then work with the editor to add private and proprietary content, and to ensure great coverage of the subject from a semantic and taxonomy perspective. Users relate to Convera powered vertical search applications, as they implicitly understand industry terminology and abbreviations



Convera also help to search engine optimize the vertical search site to attract brand new unique users from the major search engines.

Good evening everybody. My name is Andy Black from Convera. My presentation tonight is “Online traffic generation and revenue growth from vertical search”.



The audience tonight consists of publishers, editors and advertising executives from major media brands like IDG, CMP, Haymarket, Centaur, Informa, The Guardian, FT ….I just wanted to ask you all a question…..



Given that you all produce a range of specialist publications for specific professional communities, how many work related Web searches on Google or Yahoo do your target communities do per day?



Imagine if your print circulation is 20,000 and each of your readers does 10 work related Google queries a day…..that’s a lot of traffic and revenue you are giving up. We can help you reclaim some of this traffic and also help you monetise it.