CHICAGO – With the likes of Google, Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves and MSN ruling the roost in the online search business, launching a new search engine business today would be akin to bringing coals to Newcastle, right?

Not so, at least according to Bill Furlong, who ought to know. He is the founder, president and a partner of SearchChannel, a Willowbrook, Ill.-based firm that’s in the business of building search engines for media companies.

Furlong, who spoke at the recent Business Marketing Association national conference in Chicago, says a new field of vertical or B2B search is taking root in a wide variety of industries that represents a golden opportunity with relatively low start-up costs.

“From a macro sense, search is the most effective cost per lead in marketing. Period. It’s 29 cents per lead versus $9.94 for direct marketing,” Furlong said.

Furlong said vertical search is one of three “flavors” of an emerging phenomenon that industry analysts have labeled “specialized” search (the other two being local search as in Google Local and topical search).

During his presentation, Furlong rattled off some statistics that raised the eyebrows of more than a few people in the attending B2B crowd:

1. 550 million searches are done daily worldwide.
2. Google and Yahoo! account for 75 percent of all searches. Ask Jeeves and MSN account for another 20 percent.
3. $9.5 billion is projected to be spent on search engine marketing in 2005 (16 percent of which is B2B).
4. 40 percent of the average marketer’s budget is devoted to search.
5. 38 percent of Yahoo!’s target customers (advertisers) are B2B.
6. More than 50 percent of Google’s target advertisers are B2B.
7. 64 percent of search engine users search first for business information.
8. The revenue from Primedia, a B2B bigwig, rose 1.9 percent to $1.3 billion in 2004. Google’s rose 106 percent to $2.7 billion.
9. The number of adults under 30 today who read newspapers regularly is 23 percent.

Furlong, who earlier in his career was publisher of Business Marketing magazine (now BtoB) and later was one of the founders of the online marketing firm B2BWorks, went out of his way to say that he wasn’t “dissing” the mainstream search engines. For B2B marketers, though, he says the big search engines are too general and they turn up too many results that aren’t relevant enough to satisfy advertisers.

“In B2B (or if you’re a car collector or an avid fitness junkie), the general search engines aren’t delivering,” Furlong said.

As an example, Furlong cited one of his company’s clients, DentalProducts.net, which runs a search engine it calls Dental Explorer. If a dentist interested in ceramic dental products punched in “ceramics” on Google, he says the search would yield about 8 million results (many of which are about pottery or minerals).

Even refining that search to “ceramics” and “dentists” still would result in hundreds of thousands of pages and the ads in the paid search area would tend to be targeted at consumers.

Conversely, if a dentist were to search for “ceramics” on Dental Explorer, the results yielded would come from DentalProducts.net’s archives. Moreover, the ads that would appear in the search results would have been purchased by companies that wanted their ads to be seen specifically by dentists.

Furlong pointed out that there are three general devices in search engine marketing: paid search, paid inclusion and search engine optimization.

In paid search, an advertiser pays the search engine to place its ad in the search platform (usually to the right of the screen). In paid inclusion, a company pays the search engine to make sure its ad appears in the “editorial” (or organic results obtained in a search_.

Finally, search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of paying for services rendered to “hoist” one’s page to the top of the search results.

“Search engine optimization is this new black art of figuring out how to make sure your company sits on a search that makes sense for what you do,” Furlong said.

One of the attractive things about vertical search marketing is that there’s a variety of ways to get started with relatively low costs. While the general search engines operate mostly on a cost-per-click model, the verticals tend to offer monthly fees.

For example, Furlong cited one of the search engines his company built for a client. It charges $500 a month and in return the customer gets a banner ad and 25 keywords. Other models charge strictly per keyword (10 keywords for $100, for example).

What this all comes down to for marketers is what Furlong describes as vertical search’s “FAR-reaching effect” (with FAR standing for flexibility, accountability and relevance). Furlong added: “So it’s going vertical. We are amid a big trend and it will only get bigger every month.”

Among the other companies leading this vertical revolution is ThomasB2B.com.

ThomasB2B.com is part of Thomas Publishing Co., which recently announced that it has ceased publishing the print business registers it has been churning out for most of the last century. Other major players include Business.com, Scirus, Globalspec, IT.com, B2Bnet, OneUpWeb and Commpiled.com.

For more information on search engine marketing and optimization, companies can contact the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization.

Tom Power is a copy editor at Slack Barshinger, an integrated marketing communications agency. He can be e-mailed at tom.power@slackbarshinger.com.