VerticalSearch.net

This post will be updated throughout the day…

-Greg Sterling’s take on the deal

Marchex buys Openlist for $13m

Openlist is an incredible vertical search engine which crawls the web (limited crawler covering millions of pages) for local information (hotels, restaurants, and attractions) and aggregates this information in a highly structured manner. When I first used Openlist, I thought it was just another Angie’s List or Judy’s Book. I was stunned to find out there was little human involvement in the creation and organzation of the data.

Considering how quickly I was hooked to Openlist (expecially the filtering capabilities), I wasn’t surprised to hear that the company powers Boston.com’s Travel Search and Restaurant Search.

Marchex is going to leverage Openlists local content for its new local sites: www.lasvegasvacations.com, www.90210.com, www.newyorkdining.com, www.frenchrestaurants.com, www.chicagoluxuryhotels.com, and www.shanghaihotel.com.

Most people know of Marchex as the direct navigation/parked domain guys - for instance, they have all the zipcode based domains and put Google AdSense or Yahoo! Publisher Network ads on the site. With OpenList, Marchex will be able to put very high quality content on the sites, making them more attractive to consumers and more profitable for the company.

Look for Openlist to quickly expand into other verticals and continue to partner with the Boston.coms of the world as well as powering a ton of Marchex domains.

In the end, I was surprised to find out that Marchex was the buyer, but it makes a lot of sense for them.

Congrats to the Openlist team!