Most search marketers focus on Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. But B2B search marketers also have a growing number of vertical search options. Clicks and leads from these vertical search sites may not yield the same traffic as general search engines, but the percentage of qualified traffic and conversions can increase dramatically with leads from these specialized and vertical business-oriented engines. Here’s a roundup of the most important search sites and resources B2B search marketers should be targeting.

While business searchers may start their quest on a general search engine like Google, as they become more informed and progress further in the buying cycle, they often turn to other sources for additional and more detailed information. Many turn to general B2B search engines or head to niche-oriented search sites, where they hope to find fewer extraneous search results and other types of content, such as white papers, case studies, and other content marketing vehicles. The searcher’s aim is to get better information and to get it more quickly.

There are good vertical search sites and ones that are struggling to optimize their search technology and their ability to capture and organize information. The best ones deliver comprehensive results in the given niche, provide more focused search results than general search engines, and give searchers the ability to quickly and easily find relevant information.

Good vertical search sites also provide opportunity for B2B marketers, who can generate highly qualified leads and click-through due to the focused demographics of many B2B vertical search sites. That concentrated demographic also allows marketers to precisely target their ad messages and other marketing efforts. Lastly, because vertical searchers are often further in the buying cycle than their general search counterparts, the click-through and leads tend to be more valuable, giving marketers the ability to influence potential buyers as they draw closer to the purchase decision.

As B2B marketing budgets shift more strongly to online opportunities, media companies are beginning to add vertical search as a way to remain authoritative in their niches and to make up for decreasing offline revenues. And with the trend toward vertical search, we see also the growth of companies such as Convera that offer vertical search platforms that shorten the time to market for those wishing to enter the vertical search arena. Here are some of the more popular B2B search engines:

General B2B search engines

Business.com is far and away the leading general B2B search engine and directory, with six million unique visitors per month. PPC and paid directory inclusion are available to marketers. Sponsored search is syndicated to more than 100 other business sites, such as Forbes and BusinessWeek. In March, Business.com launched Channels, adding two vertical search portals (Money and Technology) to its general search capabilities. Users will benefit from more targeted information and search results; marketers will benefit by reaching a more concentrated market segment.

Several times smaller in traffic than Business.com and part of the iEntry network, Jayde is another B2B search engine and directory. Many of the search results on Jayde have company profiles with links to internal web pages, similar to Google’s site links. While Jayde says it crawls sites, it appears that it may only crawl those sites residing in its directory and those specifically identified by Jayde staff. Submitting your site to Jayde’s directory for review is free, but you’ll have to agree to be on Jayde’s list to receive emails sponsored by iEntry’s advertisers. If you opt out, your listing can be removed. Paid search is not available.

Zibb is owned by Reed Business, one of the largest business-to-business publishers. General search capabilities are supplemented by the ability to search in a limited number of silos, such as industry news and blogs, the web, and Zibb’s directory. Zibb crawls the web, winnows non-B2B content, and organizes the relevant content into taxonomies. Searchers can also drill down into these categories and further refine results by topic, content type, or source. PPC is not directly available; ads are served up by Google. Although it’s the smallest of the three general B2B search engines listed here, it is growing. Per Alexa, its traffic has nearly doubled in the last three months.

Industrial search engines and directories

GlobalSpec serves the engineering, manufacturing, and related scientific and technical market segments. Registered users can use the search bar or drill down deeply into product and service categories. Search is also available by needed specs, patent, material properties, news, application notes, part numbers, and standards. While GlobalSpec crawls the web for relevant sites/content, you can also submit a site for consideration. Sales lead and CPC programs are available for marketers, as are sponsored listings.

Similar in traffic to GlobalSpec, ThomasNet serves industrial buyers and sellers. Although there appear to be fewer silos within which to search, there are good options on ThomasNet to narrow search results by geography, certifications and standards, type of company, etc. Also available is the ability to search within CAD files. While GlobalSpec allows users to compare product catalogs of various suppliers, ThomasNet allows users to compare company information on its listed suppliers. The only way into ThomasNet’s directory is via paid listing. Banner ads are available to marketers.

Masterseek touts itself as “the world’s largest and most comprehensive B2B search engine that connects buyers and suppliers worldwide.” Several times smaller in terms of traffic than GlobalSpec or ThomasNet, Masterseek’s search options are also more limited, giving users the options to narrow their searches in two silos—companies or products. Its search results are also much more akin to general B2B search engines; the focus is on click-through to the listed sites as opposed to providing more detailed information on the companies or products. Paid search options are available. On Monday, B2bcompass Ltd., parent company of UK-based international B2B search engine b2bcompass.com, signed a letter of intent to acquire the shares of Masterseek in exchange for shares of B2bcompass.

Information technology

Part of the TechTarget network,KnowledgeStorm is the most popular search vehicle in the technology sector. Instead of delivering information and links to relevant pages on the web, KnowledgeStorm delivers links to whitepapers, webcasts, case studies, articles, reports, and analyst reviews. While KnowledgeStorm offers category sponsorships and search ads are served by Google, content marketing is the focus of the site. Users must be registered with KnowledgeStorm to view more detailed search results and must provide further lead information to obtain the actual content.

IT.com uses “dynamic peer ranking” to order its search results, with the goal of mirroring “how a large community of buyers judges each vendor’s position in the market.” While a general search tool is available, IT.com also offers more narrowed search within defined categories. PPC search-term ads are available. Also available is sponsorship of search categories, where the sponsor’s ads appear before the user searches and where the sponsor’s brand identity (with link) remains present during all search activity within the sponsored category.

Launched late last month by UK-based Incisive Media, IThound is the latest newcomer to information technology search. Like KnowledgeStorm, it delivers whitepapers, product information, webcasts, and reports. Though there are banner ads on the site, content marketing rules the day at IThound. No AdSense or PPC was noted at this time.

Global trading

Described as the “online dating service for global business,” Alibaba boasts 27 million members in more than 200 countries, field sales and marketing offices in more than 30 countries, and more than 5,200 employees. Users search for either buyers or sellers of goods and services around the world. Various advertising opportunities exist. And while you may not have heard of it, it’s one of the most popular B2B sites in the world; it has an Alexa traffic rank of 226. In October 2005, Alibaba Group and Yahoo! Inc. formed a long-term strategic partnership. Alibaba.com went public in November 2007, raising nearly $1.5 billion for the company. By comparison, Google raised $1.9 billion in its IPO.

Made-in-China is perhaps the second most popular international B2B trading site (Alexa rank 2607), but, as the name indicates, it is primarily concerned with China. The site offers marketers preferred listing placement and opportunities for banner ads.

TooToo is another global online B2B trading platform, allowing its users to further refine product and company searches by type of business (e.g., manufacturer, wholesaler/distributor, agent) and by standards certifications (e.g., ISO, CE). TooToo claims its site represents eight million manufacturers and three million buying leads. It currently has an Alexa rank of about 7500. The site doesn’t appear to offer PPC or banner ads. In addition to search listings, the site offers marketers other premium opportunities such as “showroom” web pages.

There are a number of other global trading sites, such as TradeKey, ttnet.com, and Exporters.sg.

Other vertical search sites

There are a number of other good vertical search engines in various B2B niches, like SearchFinance for corporate finance, Construction.com for the AEC community, Scirus for scientific research, and SearchMedica for medical research.

B2B vertical search is a growing area. Though B2B media companies have been slower to react than their consumer counterparts, many B2B media outlets are entering the fray, such as Incisive Media. Some not-for profit organizations are also entering the space on matters of health and research (e.g., Healia).

Perhaps one of the most targeted niche search site I found was CleanHound, owned by Trade Press Publishing Corporation. CleanHound is the search engine for cleaning professionals, providing “useful and quality information for the janitorial/sanitation executive.” While I’m sure this evoked at least a smile in most readers, if the search engine is comprehensive and well known in the industry, you can bet it’s a good medium for marketers in that space.

Whether it’s organic listings and rankings, directory inclusion, content marketing, PPC, banner ads, or sponsorships, there’s plenty of opportunity for marketers to target their efforts more precisely through B2B general and vertical search. You may not get as many clicks or leads, but you’ll get a much higher percentage of qualified traffic.

As any company trying to set up operations in China knows, getting things done is a little more difficult than in the western world. In the United States, finding a supplier is relatively easy. You can look for partners at trade shows, industry publications, or put an ad in business directories, among other places. There are the general search engine like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s Live Search. There are B2B search engines such as business.com, Zibb, and Thomasnet, and specialized vertical sites like Construction.com.

But in China, it’s typically been much harder to easily source things. If something goes wrong with one of your offshore suppliers, finding a suitable alternative is difficult. The information infrastructure is not as mature, and far fewer companies there have their own web sites, let alone web sites that are optimized for search.

Enter Alibaba. Not the story of the forty thieves, but I suppose there is gold in this story.

Open sesame

Alibaba.com is an online B2B marketplace for global trade, with participating businesses from more than 200 countries. “Think of Alibaba as the online dating service for global business,” says Scott Tong of American Public Media’s Marketplace.

No it’s not new; it launched in 1998. In fact, it’s one of the most popular B2B sites in terms of traffic. Currently, Alibaba.com has an Alexa traffic rank of 164. And it’s not just for Chinese business, either. You can search for just about anything, in any country.

On Tuesday, Alibaba went public. On its initial day of trading, Alibaba stock tripled in value, from $1.74 US to $5.09 US per share. Okay, its initial offering price wasn’t $85 per share like Google’s, but the IPO did raise $1.5 billion for the company. Just to give you a sense of scale, Google raised $1.9 billion in its IPO.

Yahoo holds a 39% stake in Alibaba.com’s parent, Alibaba group, and bought about $100 million of Alibaba shares prior to the IPO.

Magic carpet ride?

Where is all this headed? Well, many investors think Alibaba’s stock price, even at its IPO level, was not rational. Google’s IPO price was reduced to $85 on fears that it was overpriced. On Monday, Google stock reached an all-time high of $725 per share.

Regardless of what the stock price does, Alibaba has nearly 25 million members, field sales and marketing offices in more than 30 countries, and more than 4,400 employees. That’s a big platform from which to do business. If you’re doing B2B globally, it’s another search engine you need to consider, especially now that it had raised a considerable war-chest to help it survive and thrive in the global online marketplace.

RH Donnelley, which acquired SEM firm LocalLaunch in 2006 and owns the local search/online yellow pages site DexKnows, has announced the acquisition of Business.com and its related properties for $350 million.

According to PaidContent, there was an auction that included IAC, Dow Jones, News Corp. and the New York Times Company. According to comScore, Business.com’s network reach and unique visitors put it in the top 50 of US ad networks.

The acquisition will enable the yellow pages publisher diversify its online revenue base and gain technology that will help the overall business. Business.com CEO Jake Winebaum will become the new head of RH Donnelley’s Internet unit “RHDi,” to be based in Santa Monica, CA.

Here’s more detail from my blog.

Business.com Could Hit Jackpot on Auction Block from the Wall Street Journal reports that Business.com is “on the auction block.” The popular business-to-business directory is expected to make between $300 to $400 million on the sale.

Who would be interested in buying Business.com? The Wall Street Journal believes that Dow Jones and New York Times might be some of the companies to make an offer.

ZoomInfo today launched its Business Information Search Engine, a service that offers information on more than 3.5 million companies. Although the company profiles are similar to those offered by Hoovers.com and other subscription-based providers, ZoomInfo business profiles are free.

The profiles also differ in how they’re compiled. While most business information providers laboriously compile information by hand, ZoomInfo has developed a semantic search engine that crawls the web and semantically tags, aggregates and organizes information automatically for each company it tracks.

Typical profiles, such as this one of Microsoft, offers descriptions, M&A activities, their revenues, key employees, competitors and current job openings. Through a partnership with Indeed.com, current job openings at the company are also displayed.

You can search for companies by name, product category, industry, market niche, revenues and so on. You can also search for specific people by name, with results coming from ZoomInfo’s 35 million individual profiles that I’ve written about elsewhere.

You can also search for people within companies through ZoomInfo’s premium ZoomExec service, available for a $99 monthly subscription fee.

Reed Elsevier is one of the largest, most influential publishers in the world, a powerhouse in the science and medical, legal, education and business markets. But the company also has a major online presence, with more than 1,000 web sites in just its business group.

Last year, Reed Business decided to leverage this significant online presence by creating Zibb, a business-to-business search engine that allows users to search across all of Reed Business’ web sites. But Zibb goes beyond that—Reed also indexes billions of other business-related URLs from all over the web, including competitor web sites.

The result is a very powerful B2B search engine that often returns much better results for business-related queries than mainstream search engines.

Reed Business also decided to integrate this technology into the site search tools for its web sites, which range from the Asia Food Journal to entertainment bellwether Variety. Using search technology from FAST, Zibb on Demand allows each of these sites to offer their own content and the best of the web that’s related to the site’s specialty.

To oversee these efforts, Reed Business hired Stephen Baker to be CEO of Reed Business Search. Stephen is a long-time industry veteran, having put in stints with FAST during its AlltheWeb days, on to Overture and Yahoo, and then back to FAST as general manager of enterprise search. So he’s the ideal person to drive a search group that covers a vast vertical slice of the web, as well as content from a huge global enterprise.

I caught up with Stephen this week to find out what’s new with Zibb and talk about the opportunities he sees going forward in B2B search.

Q: The companies that measure traffic say that Google continues to take market share. Why decide now to start a specialized B2B search service? And why the name Zibb?

Why Zibb? It’s the name of one of Reed Business’ leading publications in the Netherlands. We were looking for a name that is memorable and avoids language-boundaries, which Zibb does. Also, brand names that begin with “z” are more memorable and it has the “BB” in it which could lead to some fun branding and logo design.

While Google is taking market share, we believe that there is a segment of the B2B market that is not 100% satisfied with the results they get from a “general” SE. Specifically, Outsell reports that approximately 1/3 of B2B professionals do not find the information they are looking for when using Google. Our research confirms this.

Furthermore, when you look at the amount of time that professionals spend searching, gathering, and analyzing information, you see that a lot of time is wasted “searching” for information. Between 2001 and 2005, the number of hours spent on information-related tasks increased from 8/week to 13/week and the percentage of time spent “searching” for information increases from 45% to 55%. All of these factors combined indicate that a) search is very important in the daily life of a B2B professional and b) they are not always finding what they are looking for at Google. We feel that this need can be best addressed through a B2B vertical search service.

Q: Do you think all this wasted time and effort is a reflection on the skills of searchers?

Yes and No. Certainly, based on our research, utilization of advanced search features on the major engines is low so when searchers are looking for B2B content, they are often confronted with noise in the results that could be eliminated, to a degree, through advanced search functions. However, this behavior points to the underlying expectation that advanced search features shouldn’t be required to find relevant results. So, with Zibb (and other vertical SE’s), we are basically trying to give the searcher what they want: the “right” answer within a narrower context.

Q: Do you plan to add advanced search or query refinement tools to maybe help people zero-in even more on their target?

Since we’re really focused on improving search productivity and it is our top priority is to provide relevant results with the search and browse paradigm that characterizes Zibb, currently. However, we have a tremendous amount of enriched data describing the content that we aggregate that naturally lends itself to advanced features for the power searcher. So “yes”, over time, we will bring some of that meta data to the forefront of the user experience.

Q: You’re using FAST technology to crawl the web, but also massaging the data you get. You’re crawling 4-5 billion documents every couple of months -What kinds of things are you doing to winnow out non B2B content from search results? And if you’ve got one big index, how and why do search results differ on Variety vs. a site like Flight International?

We are using a series of heuristics to identify relevant B2B content. These range from editorial processes – we have some of the best subject matter experts in house and they continually help us find sites and content that are relevant to their sector – to offline analysis of link structures and anchor texts to identify relevant sites during index build. Of course, we are using an adaptive framework to train the crawler to get smatter with each crawl iteration.

Once we have discarded the non-B2B content, we categorize the content into one of 26 industry taxonomies and describe the content as being a news article, supplier listing, etc. The API’s for the Reed Business Search platform allow for individual websites to specify the query recall set at the industry, sub-industry, or content type level. Hence, Variety can consume only media-related search results while Flight International consumes aerospace results.

Q: Why is Reed Business including content from competitors in Zibb search results?

The goal of Zibb is to provide a search utility for the B2B market. In order to truly provide a valuable service, we believe that Zibb must be a) contextually relevant to the B2B sector and b) comprehensive across all relevant content sources.

Q: I would think some of your competitors wouldn’t want to be part of this—do you have any opting out, or putting other requirements on you to allow you to use their content?

Yes, we occasionally get calls from competitors asking why we are crawling their site so regularly and thoroughly. Some have even blocked our crawlers, however, once they learn that Zibb is focused on becoming a B2B search destination focused on all relevant content, not just Reed Business content, and that our ranking algorithm is unbiased towards Reed Business content, they are usually happy to participate.

Q: How about some stats? How many companies indexed? How many topics, geographic entities and so on?

Currently, we track 17K public companies serving B2B markets, and about 23% of those have strong coverage in our indices. “Coverage,” for our purposes, is a measure of web presence of a particular entity.

Down deep in the tail, we track 1.8M companies also serving B2B professionals, though often in a local or brick and mortar fashion and we’ve found that their online coverage is much weaker with only about 3% passing our “Strong coverage” threshold. Bear in mind that we still track and recognize all of these companies against our full index, we just recognize that many are not well represented online.

Our product categories have 46% strong coverage for the 181K we track, and our topics have 70% strong coverage for the over 2K that we have publicly released to date.

What we’ll see happening over time is that we’ll grow our universe of public and private companies tracked and simultaneously we’ll continue to seek additional web sources of information to strengthen the coverage. This same strategy will be methodically applied to product categories and topics. With our human and machine power we feel that we have a sustainable, scalable, ever-improving approach that will expand even faster as we build within the B2B community who in turn will start helping to shape our growth.

Q: Do B2B searchers differ in how they search from people doing more general searches on Google & Yahoo?

We’re finding that search behavior is relatively consistent. People have the same information needs in B2B as the do in B2C: Read the news and get updates on products, services and companies; perform research functions; look for places to buy things. Of course, search behavior within each of these activities varies (for example, people prefer to browse for news “tell me what’s new” and employ geographic/parametric search for vendors “I’m looking for a company that makes ball bearings in NJ.”) But, in terms of the number of terms per query or the specificity that is employed when looking for eg, product information, there isn’t too much variation.

Q: I would think B2B searchers might tend to have more long tail queries—more specific in expressing what they’re looking for. Have you seen that?

Yes, this is absolutely the case. By nature, B2B trade media is really about having deep subject matter expertise. This is reflected in our content and the needs of our search customers. A portion of the queries that we see are for specific products, parts, and company names which tend to be long-tail queries.

Q: How does Zibb differ from Zibb On Demand?

The Reed Business Search team has built two products. The first is a branded B2B search destination, called Zibb. It is located at www.zibb.com and its Dutch counterpart is located at www.zibbsearch.nl. Zibb on Demand is the hosted vertical search service that we provide to our sites, partners, and affiliates. Zibb on Demand has all of the same features as Zibb and allows the customer to specify the industry and type of content they want included in the results. You can see a couple of examples: Variety.com uses Zibb on Demand to power search across the site, media news search, and media web search. Expert Business Source does the same for small business information.

Q: Customized verticals have been gaining a lot of popularity recently—Google custom search, Eurekster’s Swikis, Rollyo and others. Any plans to create APIs and let users create their own customized B2B vertical search using the Zibb index?

Absolutely. Right now we are focused on building a search platform that meets the immediate needs of our brands, businesses, and partners, however, personalization and custom verticals are features that the Reed Business Search platform support and their deployment will be prioritized as the business needs dictate.

Q: What opportunities do you offer for advertisers who want to reach B2B searchers?

Right now we are using Google AdSense for Search. Later this year, we will offer additional advertising products.

Q: Any tips on optimizing content for sites that want to rank well in Zibb?

We’re looking for unique, targeted, well described content for the B2B sector. You can see the vertical industries that we are targeting on the Zibb.com homepage. If you are writing content targeted to the B2B audience, keep the industry sector in mind and choose relevant phrases. We’re also very good about looking for new content via site maps, RSS, and other natural web protocols. Other than that, if you’re site is well optimized for Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc., then you’ll do fine in Zibb. And, of course, we have editors on the back-end making sure that our spam detection and categorization algorithms are performing well.

Q: What kind of traffic are you getting? What kind of growth? What growth are you projecting/expecting over the next 1-3-5 years?

So far, both growth of Zibb.com and adoption of Zibb on Demand have been strong. Traffic is growing in excess of 50% month-over-month and Zibb on Demand is currently live on about 30 sites with many, many more scheduled to deploy this year. Looking out beyond 2007 is anyone’s guess. We certainly see a market opportunity for providing a unique B2B search experience and hope that we have a meaningful position in the market beyond 2007.

Thanks, Stephen.

The Q&A Land column appears Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

Noticed on Search Engine Watch, the B2B arm of mega-publisher Reed Elsevier has launched Zibb.com, a “vertical” search engine for business users. I say that in quotes because it’s vertical in the way that Business.com is vertical. It’s really a general engine for B2B users.

Zibb also offers general Web and blog search and is built on the FAST enterprise platform. Former FAST VP Stephen Baker is CEO of Reed Business Search and responsible for Zibb and other search initiatives at Reed.