In a couple of recent issues of this newsletter (see editorial links below) I discussed the growing market for vertical search engines and how they address the needs of professional users better than horizontal search services. Well, it seems a wave of products and services in this area is starting to appear. I have just been taking a look at a very new vertical search engine: Watch360 from Watch360 Systems.

While it ostensibly tracks data similar to that of our previous example, EDC Legal Advantage, Watch360 is rather more general and driven primarily by Web content rather than databases.

Watch360 exists to monitor company data through their Web sites. The standard tracked content includes data on the board of directors, executive bios, news and press releases. Additionally, you can specify which Web pages you want monitored for changes and keywords.

Monitoring ignores HTML markup, date changes, and all the obvious routine modifications and focuses on relevant content which you can fine-tune by setting thresholds that define the number of changes required before a notification is generated.

If you set up a “watch,” say, of a competitor’s product pricing page and just the price changes from $2,500 to $2,700, you will see just the changed figures in the notification. To get the actual context there will be a link back to the page and the modified content will be highlighted making it easy to identify what has changed.

Once a day (or however many days apart you prefer), Watch360 will send you an e-mail message showing the status of all of the companies you are watching with changed content noted. The standard package tracks up to 400 Web pages - Watch360 says that is equivalent to about 40 companies.

Of course, the online data for companies doesn’t follow a set format (if there was ever a need for a standard XML format, this is a great example) so Watch360 uses humans to identify the correct Web pages to start with.

Watch360 claims around 10,000 companies are now indexed, and if you submit a new one, a human at Watch360 will explore the company’s site and make sure that the relevant URLs are added to their database.

If you are keeping tabs on the competition or keeping an eye on market players this Watch360 addresses research and day-to-day monitoring.

Subscription pricing is $495 per year and a free trial is available.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.