In the age of increasingly more specialization in search, it seems there’s another segment getting attention.
The paint isn’t even dry and San Francisco based Finervista seems to have experienced a successful début of an educational search platform. Serving thousands of webcasts through their searchable index, they provide a wonderful resource for business executives, legal professionals, and engineers, which, as best as I can discern, is the only vertical search engine of its kind. The free online training videos in their index are accessible to anyone and with buy-in from some industry powerhouses including WebEx, IBM, and Microsoft, they are as comprehensive as is YouTube for entertainment.
There is a lack of information about company details, which is a bit annoying and their site design and interface is fairly vanilla but chalking that up as a simple startup detail, Finervista strikes me as having discovered an incredibly valuable niche market. As Google, Yahoo, and the others continue to expand their indexes, providing more and more information from the web in a “Universal” experience; I believe users will rebel (to some degree) and increasingly turn to vertical search engines for the refined experience. If Finervista can carve-out a loyal and increasingly sizable following by leveraging their content list I think they could be the one to watch in the world of video online training and education.
