It was announced earlier this week that Convera and SearchChannel have formed a strategic partnership. This relationship pairs up Convera, a vertical search engine platform provider, with SearchChannel, an e-media and search engine marketing consulting firm.
According to the announcement, SearchChannel will consult with Convera on the development of online business solutions for B-to-B publishers, and SearchChannel will provide consulting services to Convera’s customers. These services will include search engine optimization, online advertising sales training, and revenue and analytics modeling. SearchChannel also has it’s own vertical search engine sites, which it will integrate with Convera’s vertical search platform.
One of the major goals of the partnership appears to be to help Convera’s customers drive more traffic to their vertical search engines. This makes sense, as one of the biggest challenges for vertical search is getting a user to recognize that it exists, and to recognize its added value over a horizontal search platform, such as Google. The added value needs to be substantial before people will make the switch to use a vertical search engine for their specific needs.