What Is A Horizontal Search Engine?

Date First Published: 7th February 2023

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: Web Services

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty Level: 5/10

CONTENTS

Limitations Of Horizontal Search Engines
Examples Of Horizontal Search Engines

Learn more about what a horizontal search engine is in this article.

A horizontal search engine is a general-purpose search engine that horizontally searches through the whole web and focuses on all types of online content rather than a specific type of content, which is what a vertical search engine focuses on. Google and Bing’s default search are good examples of horizontal search engines that cover a massive amount of topics and formats. It will return a much larger number of results than a vertical search engine.

Unlike vertical search engines that often use a focused crawler, which will only index webpages relevant to a specific topic or a set of topics, horizontal search engines index large portions of the World Wide Web using a general web crawler.

Limitations Of Horizontal Search Engines

Even though horizontal search engines are designed to suit all user needs by returning a bit of everything in the search results, they do come with some limitations. These include:

Too much competition. Because horizontal search engines are very general and not targeted to specific needs, they will have to index and rank much more webpages. As a result, they face a lot of competition, often too much for new sites to rank. This makes it impractical for new sites to entirely rely on horizontal search engines for people to find it and makes it very difficult for most sites to rank for short-tail keywords with a high search volume.
Risk of poor user experience. Since horizontal search engines return broad results, not all the information provided is likely to be relevant to a search query. As a result, users can get overwhelmed by the large number of results when they look for specific information.
Slower and less efficient. Since they focus on all types of content, the search results are not targeted. Users may have to browse through irrelevant topics whilst looking through results.
Less targeted search results. Since horizontal search engines focus on all types of content rather than a specific type of content, less targeted results can be provided by horizontal search engines. This will decrease the relevancy of all the returned results.

Examples Of Horizontal Search Engines

It is not possible to cover every horizontal search engine here. There are definitely less horizontal search engines than vertical search engines, but some examples of major vertical search engines are:

Google search - A search engine provided by Google, accessible at google.com. It is the most visited website in the world and the order of the search results returned by Google is based on a ranking algorithm called PageRank.
Bing - A search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. It provides a standard web search and searches for images, videos, shopping, news, maps, and other categories.
Yandex Search - A search engine owned and operated by Yandex, based in Russia. Yandex Search is the second largest search engine in Russia with a 39.6% market share in Russia compared to Google's 57.9% market share in June 2020.
Yahoo Search - A search engine owned by Yahoo that uses Microsoft's Bing search engine to power results.
DuckDuckGo - A search engine that puts emphasis on protecting people's privacy and anonymity.