Typical search engines crawl and index the many, many pages of the Internet. If you search using one or two search terms like what most searchers do, you will get quite a number of page results. Most of these results are not the ones you are really looking for. It is not unusual that the search engine will treat your search terms differently than what you intend it to be.

For instance, a simple search for the word bow will give you results as shown below:

* bow - a weapon
* bow - a toolkit for statistical modeling
* bow - involves movement of the head

Searching this way can be time-consuming and a bit frustrating, especially if you don't know any sophisticated search techniques to get a more targeted result for your searches. This is where specialty search engines come in handy. Specialty search engines are more focused on a specific subject or topic thus they will give you more relevant results. In the above example, someone who wants to know more about it as it relates to sports can easily search for bow by using a sports search engine.

Specialty search engines are also known as topical search engines, vertical search engines or vortals. Specialty search engines focus on a specific topic like business or medical research, a geographic location, a target audience, or a specific file format like pdf files. Unlike general search engines, they search from only a few specific sites thus they often offer greater depth of coverage for a category that makes results narrower and more relevant.

Other specialty search engines also operate like directories where a human editor who is an expert in the subject reviews submitted sites before they got listed. This means that search results from specialty search engines are often of higher quality and more reliable than what you get from general search engines.

Specialty search engines can also help find the invisible web. Invisible web refers to the vast repository of information like databases that search engines and directories cannot retrieve. Not everything on the Web is visible because of technical barriers of search engine crawlers and the site owner's deliberate choice of excluding his web pages from the search engines. The invisible web offers a gold mine of information that every web searcher do not want to miss.

Author by : Arlene Cuares