Under the terms of a joint multi-year development agreement business-to-business information provider UBM will tap Convera’s Excalibur search technology to build a custom web search service for healthcare professionals.
The agreement also includes a revenue sharing component.
The move is part of a growing trend in the industry to provide so-called vertical search engines that specialize in certain types of data. These types of search engines differ from internet engines Google and Yahoo! because the semantics and intent around the search query are clearer. They also tend to use proprietary databases rather than data gathered from freely searchable web resources.
Examples of vertical search engines include Kosmix for healthcare information and Zillow for real estate.
