A mechanism is provided for search engine domain transfer. The mechanism receives an input query to search a specialized domain from a user and performs a general-domain search based on the input query to generate a set of general-domain results. The mechanism generates a feature vector based on the general-domain results and generates a score for each document within the specialized domain based on the feature vector. The mechanism generates a ranked result set of documents based on the scores of the documents in the specialized domain and presents the ranked result set to the user.