Well folks, Christmas has passed but we're here with the gift that keeps on giving: Another installment of Whiteboard Friday! To round out our last episode of 2007, we brought our good friend and search industry celebrity, Vanessa Fox, into Whiteboard studios to talk about Vertical Search (or Search 3.0, if you will).

Vertical, Blended, Shaken, Stirred...however you like your search results mixed, this aspect is one that is becoming increasingly more important in our industry. As the engines work harder to integrate results, it offers tremendous opportunities (and challenges) in getting different content media for the same site to rank for target terms.

In the video, Vanessa and Rand discuss the results they found at the different engines for the search "britney videos" (no, I haven't bothered to ask). The screencaps below the videos show the difference in the results offered up by Google and Ask, respectively. As you'll see, Ask is way more integrated (in fact, blended results seem to be their primary marketing focus), whereas Google suffers a bit, despite the presence of non-thumbnail YouTube links in the SERP.  Vanessa also mentions that the engines are all integrating their results because while us savvy folk know to click the Image or Video or Shopping tabs to find targeted content, average users don't even acknowledge the existence of specialized search tabs.

Without further ado, here's the video (broken into two parts because YouTube will not hook me up with an account that allows segments over 10 minutes long).