What are Specialty Search Engines

Specialty search engines are software applications which provide users search results within a specified niche.  For example, it may be finding out the findings about something on some data source in one geographic place, or using a special feature such as enhanced user privacy or less environmentally harmful operations.

Although Google controls the majority of the search engine industry, it is still possible for some businesses to gain benefits from listing in the correct niche search engine.  In order to perform specialist search engines, you need to know not only what specialist search engines are, how do they work and who they are targeting.

If your company should use specialist search engines for SEO, what you can find on some of the best-known specialty search engines, and how to start today.

Should I Pay Attention to Specialty Search Engines for My Business?

The first step is to decide whether it is worth spending time thinking about specialized search engines.  At present, Google has a global market share of 92.07%.  At present, Google has 87.43% market share in the United States.

People will mostly use Google to find your company.  To improve the chances of people finding you, you must optimize your website and its pages for Google.  However, this does not mean that you cannot choose other search engines.

There are 2 main scenarios when it may be useful to optimize for a specialty search engine:

• It already exists and is being discovered by a relevant audience on a specialized search engine.
• Most likely your target demographic has a specialized search engine.

How Do I Know If I’m Getting Traffic from a Specialty Search Engine?

The easiest way to know whether traffic to your website is from the specialized search engines is by checking Google Analytics.

Look under All Traffic in the Acquisition Reporting section to examine the Source/Medium report.  To search only in search engines, write ‘organic’ in the search bar.  This is to where you can check how many people were visiting your website from different search engines.

There are some websites that Google Analytics does not consider as search engine, and depending on how you define a search engine, you may wish to check them out.  For instance, Craigslist is a job search engine but Analytics will show it as a referral medium and not organic.  If you enter ‘referral’ in the search bar and you can see these results.

What Are Specialty Search Engines Used For?

You might not be getting any traffic from specialized search engines, but your audience is most likely there.  It is necessary to consider the purposes of specialized search engines and if your target audience is among them.

When trying to find out if your target audience might turn to a niche search engine, suppose they spend their time within a specific industry, have specific values and/or locates in specific spots.  While you could also study the search patterns of your audience through study, anecdotal evidence, and polls.

Geographical Region-Specific Search Engines

If you cater to clients from such nations, it’s important to think about which search engines are more widely used.

China is one of the few countries where Google does not rank among the top three search engines.  Baidu, Bing, Sogou and Google have the market shares of 79.49%, 8.77%, 4.22%, and 3.02%, respectively.

Even though Naver also enjoys a large amount of searches (18.91%), Google has a 75.21% market share in South Korea.

As a matter of fact, Google is the most popular search engine in Japan (74.97%) but Yahoo is responsible for a considerable number of searches (16.2%).

Similarly, Google holds 94.98% of Taiwan’s search volume, while Yahoo! makes up 3.56%.

Google, Bing and Yahoo are the top three search engines in Canada, the UK, and the US. But Google has a much higher market share in Canada (91.42%) and the UK (92.8%) than it does in the US (87.43%).

Unique Search Engines for Environmental and Privacy Goals

Google tracks user behavior so your target customers may not want to use it if they care about privacy.  In addition, Google search engines adjust their results, this may result in a “filter bubble” in which people will receive search results that support their views.

DuckDuckGo is the most popular niche search engine that puts the focus on user privacy.  It has a share of 2.4% in the US and is ranked as the 4th most popular search engine.

Today, Ecosia has become the leading supplier of environmentally friendly special search engines for consumers who appreciate sustainability.  It is the fifth most popular search engine in the United States with a 0.11% market share.

Ecosia is a certified B Corporation with an impact score of 106.8, which is higher than the certification threshold of 80 as well as the median business score of 50.9 — and in addition to using renewable energy to power all of its searches, it donates 80 percent of its ad revenue to tree planting.

Colleges and universities students are also demanding that Ecosia be the default search engine on campus.  In 2018, the platform was used by over 300,000 students from 20 colleges.  Ecosia and Forbes report that a few universities, including Ohio State University, Toulouse Business School, the University of Glasgow, the University of Leeds and the University of Sussex, have chosen Ecosia as their official search engine.

Top 7 Specialized Search Engines

Here is the list of the seven well known search engines that each have different niches.

1. Google Scholar

• Google Scholar is a well-known specialized search engine.
• Google Scholar is one known specialized search engine.
• Targeted: Scholarly writings and academic literature
• Strengths: Large collection of books, research papers, theses, and conference proceedings. Through the advanced search, users can use date, author, publication as filters.

2. PubMed

• PubMed is a specialised online search engine for medicine.
• PubMed is an online search engine for medicine.
• Topic: Life sciences and biomedical literature
• Pros: It is an open access library that provides access to millions of citations and papers, thereby being a comprehensive resource for medical research. Using its sophisticated search and filter features, it can be searched for clinical studies, reviews and free full text papers.

3. Scopus

• Scopus is the paid specialized search engine.
• Scopus is the paid specialized search engine.
• Academic research abstracts, citation databases
• Strength: Metrics/time series for authors and the journals, excellent monitoring of citations, very good tools for citation analysis. This is because Scopus is a flexible tool that covers a large range of subjects including science, technology, health and social sciences.

4. Web of Science

• Web of Science—strong database of citations.
• The main focus is on multidisciplinary citation database.
• Strengths: Comprehensive tracking and analysis of citations. It allows users to connect various relevant papers and study research trends.  It also includes books, conference proceedings and scholarly journal indexes.

5. Semantic Scholar

• Semantic Scholar is an AI driven search engine that is free.
• An AI driving scientific literature research search engine.
• Strengths: The use of machine learning to improve search results, and citation graphs etc. It also offers tools for tracking writers and some subjects.

6. arXiv

• arXiv is a specialized search engine run by CornellTech.
• arXiv is CornellTech’s specialized search engine.
• Preprints in computer science, physics, mathematics, quantitative biology, and other fields
• Advantages: ArXiv makes the academic publications available for free at the early stage of the writing process in order to promote the feedback and collaboration. Users can do searches and filtering of preprints by category and submission date.

7. LexisNexis

• It is a legal document search engine.
• It is a legal document search engine.
• Focus: News and legal research
• Strengths: It has a comprehensive database of news stories, legal documents, and company data. Also, LexisNexis also offers the strong case law, legislation tracking and legal research capabilities.

While the general public may not care for specialty search engines, they are important for locating online material and for professionals in various industries to find the answers to their questions.

General purpose search engines are good for routine queries, while niche search solutions help the consumers to find more relevant and reliable results.  Especially in scholarly study or search for legal documents or medical data, this is extremely important.