Vertical Search is a new phenomenon in the internet world and it has been created to give people the search results that would actually be useful (alteast most of them).

Broad-based search engines like Google and Yahoo fetch crawl a very large numbers of websites and documents and save the results in a common database and it is from this database that search results are pulled out and given to the user.

Vertical search engines, on the other hand, send their spiders out to a highly refined database, and their indexes contain information about a specific topic. The results thrown up by the vertical search engines cater to what the user is really looking for. The companies that advertise on these search engines reach the very niche they cater to.

Here are some of the vertical search engines – Looksmart, Retrevo, Pluggd, KnowledgeStorm’s KnowIT.

A three year old child from Lincolnshire bought a car for £9,000 (approx $23,000) when his mother was not looking. As she turned her back, he pressed the ‘buy now’ button and that has impressed his mother.

Rachel Neal said “Jack’s a whizz on the PC and just pressed all the right buttons. I was horrified. We now have the parental locks on – and we make sure we sign out of eBay.”

All the right buttons? ummmm I dont think so. Maybe he was looking for the ‘Why would anyone look at buying a bright pink car’ button and could not find it.

Luckily for the Neals, the seller has laughed this away and agreed to re-advertise the car on Ebay.

This is how RSS can help your business go further in the online world.

Search Engines

RSS has been known to significantly impact search engine rankings, even low-traffic personal pages reach the first page position during searches. Search engines have started adopting RSS-specific strategies which rely on the number of inbound links to a website and also the specific RSS feed format. This helps search engines provide additional content on their pages which can be taken from the publisher’s website. Since the number of RSS feeds are low when compared to the number of web pages that are online, the search engines give additional credit to RSS feed publishers.

RSS directories

Getting the RSS feeds registered on various RSS directories help business improve their visibility. These directories introduce the business and its RSS feed to a wide audience and this in turn not only improves visibility but also improves search engine rankings.

Syndicate content to other channels

RSS helps business syndicate the content to other websites. Using RSS, the business does not require the services of a third party company to deliver content to other channels. This helps the business not only cut cost but also ensure that the content has not changed form before it reaches the ultimate consumer. This method would also help the business get new visitors that are interested in the topic covered by the content delivered.

Branded RSS Aggregators

The emergence of RSS has spawned the development of many RSS aggregators and one of the newest trends is marketing using these RSS aggregators. Companies are buying space on these RSS aggregators as they would get great mileage as they would with advertising on a program like Outlook express with users seeing the company’s brand and ads every time they start up and use the software.

Distribution Channel

RSS feeds give business a new distribution channel. Using RSS feeds, websites and business have a new channel through which they can communicate with visitors/customers and send information. This gives businesses an opportunity to get past the problem of the spam filter which they would normally face when they adopt marketing through email. The emails never get past most of the spam filters and therefore, the audience does not get to see them.

RSS helps build a community

RSS helps build a community among the businesses using this technology to grow. Businesses try and find new methods and ways to use RSS to reach their customer base and this in turn, helps other businesses learn from the competition.

RSS improves the site/user relationship

RSS helps improve the relationship between the user and the website. By receiving RSS feeds from a source, the user is kept updated on the new content available on the website. This phenomenon could be compared to the Newspaper market. The readers get the updated newspaper everyday without asking for it everyday and this creates a deep relationship between the media and the consumer. And like the newspaper subscription, the websites know that there is a guarantee that the content will be seen by the user.

RSS Advertising

RSS has made way for a new form of advertising. Companies like Feedster.com, pay users to add advertisements to their feeds. Since this is a new form of advertising and not yet proven successful, early advertisers will get low prices and probably high success rates. When a user signs up with a service like feedster.com, the advertising company will generate the RSS feeds for the user. This feed will be showcased on the user’s website or content source and anyone who has subscribed to this RSS feed will not only get content from this source but also advertisements which have been added by feedster.com.

Has anyone heard about a company called Seitz? Well, I hadn’t till now. Seitz is a Swiss camera manufacturer known for making cameras with great designs and not-so-great price tags. They have recently launched the panoramic D3 camera which can take 360 Degree Photos In Two Seconds.In these 2 seconds, D3 will capture 470 million pixels worth of color and light.

Before you head out to Geneva in 2007 to buy this 160 Megapixel bad boy, let us warn you that it will cost you about $38,000.

You can reserve your camera here.

Motorola is planning on installing “InstantMoto” vending machines, so take out your credit card and buy a brand new Razr. Motorola plans to start selling its cellphones and accessories in vending machines in over 20 malls and airports around the U.S. You can also buy phones without plans and insert your present SIM card and you are good to go.

“This on-demand retail solution is an interesting approach to the many extensions of our retail strategy,” said Motorola corporate VP of global retail Jason Few. INSTANTMOTO “is an opportunity to bring never-seen-before convenience to consumers.”

Would you buy a phone from a vending machine?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has 4 most commonly used standards and they are mentioned below:

(i) RSS 0.91

RSS 0.91 is the oldest and the most common RSS standard in use today. This standard of RSS was developed by Netscape tem led by Dan Libby in July 1999. This standard was pull based, which meant that the user would have to pull the feed from the source.

(ii) RSS 0.92

RSS 0.92 was released on December 25th, 2000 and was XML-based just like its predecessor. This standard was primarily pull-based but had a facility to publish and subscribe as well.

(iii) RSS 1.0

RSS 1.0 provides much richer metadata and RSS 1.0 attains this capability thanks to the addition of RDF, namespaces and modularization. Although this adds a lot of complexity to the standard, its benefits justify it.

(iv) RSS 2.0

RSS 2.0 provides more modularization and therefore increases the complexity even further.
Click here to read more about RSS 2.0.