EdComp.com, a new vertical search engine, bills itself as a “free computer education and training search” engine. EdComp.com helps users find free online computer training courses and documents from a database of over 140,000 Web resources. This new niche search site seeks to give better results than general purpose search engines like Google or Yahoo!

“Along with adding more free online computer and IT training and educational resources in the future, we will also be adding features to EdComp.com's indexed resources in the future, including for each, the number of user hits, user ratings and comments, and cached pages with an opt-out option”, said Scott Turton, one of the general partners of DeepSearcher, which owns Edcomp.com.

A search for “Microsoft Word”, for example, yielded results from learnthat.com, which offers a free Microsoft Word tutorial and a Microsoft Word course. A search for “perl” yielded results from perl.com and devshed.com, which offers Perl tutorials and Perl help.

“Search engines are now generally regarded as the killer app of the Internet, and we want to play a role in this arena, as they relate to smaller, vertical or niche areas of interest,” said Turton. Experts agree that niche, or vertical search engines are currently an up and coming force to be reckoned with on the Web and offer an efficient alternative to traditional search engines when the results returned by general-purpose search engines contain advertising related sites and other non-relevant search results.”

According to a recent JupiterResearch report titled "Vertical Search: Early Marketers Will Reap Rewards of Low Pricing," that the search industry will develop in much the same way historical media markets before it have, with the broad-based search engines spawning a raft of vertical search engines dedicated to specific categories. "Broad-based search engines are extremely good at navigating vast amounts of information, but extremely poor at helping a consumer make a purchase decision," said Niki Scevak, analyst with JupiterResearch. "This creates a large opportunity to enhance the consumer experience with vertical search," added Scevak.

This recent JupiterResearch report finds that paid search spending in the U.S. is highly concentrated. Just four categories - retail, financial services, media and entertainment and travel - accounted for 79% of the $2.6 billion spent on paid search in 2004. Each vertical provides a rich landscape of opportunity and a blueprint for how other categories will develop.

EdComp serves up quick search results for users looking for specific information. However, unlike other search engines, EdComp offers a series of predefined searches, all categorized into separate topics such as Java, Web Development, C++ Programming, Linux, .NET, C# Programming, Windows, PHP, MCSE Exams, Dreamweaver, FrontPage, Oracle, HTML, and Hardware. There are literally hundreds of predefined topics to choose from.

For more information about EdComp, visit www.edcomp.com.

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