Well, it depends. Are you in the mining, healthcare, or shipping business? Or, are you interested in origins of minestrone soup, synonyms for awesome in the urban dictionary, or Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal?

Last week, I entered the keyword OSM in leading web search engines. What I found made me wonder how professionals ever find what they are looking for on the web.

The Google search engine returned about 7 million results. The top result was the Office of Surface Mining home page. Following, in the top 10, were results from Oregon Steel Mills home page (a North American diversified steelmaker), OSM Wiki page, and Open Source Matters home page (an IT non-profit organization). Interestingly, OSM as the Synonym for Awesome in the Urban Dictionary and OSM as in Origins of minestrone soup were ranked higher than OSM gene(Oncostatin M).

The Yahoo search engine returned 19 million results. The top result was OSM as in the ticker symbol for a public company. Following were results like Office of Surface Mining home page, OSM as in Offshore and Ship Management (a global shipping company in Norway), and OSM gene. Interestingly, Oregon Steel Mills (a steelmaker) and OSM Networks (a web design company from Canada) topped OSM Wiki page in Yahoo top 10 rankings.

Finally, I tried the OSM search in Microsoft Live which returned about a million results. The results were similar to Google and Yahoo with the exception of Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal ranking in the top 10!

In Google and Microsoft Live, the search results pages did not contain advertisements. In Yahoo, the search results pages displayed a couple of ads, one of them was for a review for the eco friendly Honda Open Study Model (OSM)!

A relevant web search experience, high precision, and targeted advertising are exactly what Convera offers to professional communities who are frustrated with leading web search engines. Here’s how Convera’s custom vertical search engines do that for mining, healthcare, or shipping professionals.

-    SearchMining is a custom professional search engine built by Aspermont for mining professionals. Here’s what I got when I searched for OSM: About 1200 results. All of them were about Office of Surface Mining from the mining slice of the web crafted by Aspermont editorial team. The top result was home page of Office of Surface Mining. Results were organized by categories such as companies, news, research, technology. Advertisements were targeted toward mining professionals

-    SearchMedica is a professional vertical search engine built by CMP Medica for medical professionals. Here’s what I found there. About 2500 search results about the Oncostatin M gene. Results were organized by facets such as research reviews, evidence based articles, patient education, and clinical trials. Next to the results, there is a dynamic drilldown widget with medical terminology relevant to doctors who may be interested in digging deeper in the results. Advertisements were targeted toward medical professionals.

-    MaritimeAnswers is a professional vertical search engine built by Informa Maritime for shipping professionals. The Convera search engine returned only about 450 results -- all from the shipping slice of the web crafted by Informa Maritime’s editorial team. The top result was a document about Offshore and Ship Management and top ten results were all about OSM the Norwegian Ship Manager.

Compartmentalize the web by creating virtual private indexes, search the compartments with relevant semantic resources, return relevant results for the professional, and serve relevant ads. That’s what Convera does.