Vertical searching your way

Google recently launched an interesting new service that lets anyone define their own vertical search engine. Called Google Custom Search, the service is part of Google Co-Op, Goobe's new push to create API'd search features that users can install on their own sites.

Google Custom Search allows you to define a list of sites that you want it to search. It's quite easy to set up. It didn't take me long at all to define a vertical search engine for Web 2.0 and New Media sites (which you can try out on our sidebar to the right) and put it up on the site.

This is a smart move from Google's perspective in a lot of ways. Obviously, it gives Google inroads to a lot of new and fallow real estate. It also sets up a major challenge to the legions of VC-backed vertical search engine plays that have been popping up recently.