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Yahoo! Adds Metasearch to HotJobs

Yahoo! Adds Metasearch to HotJobs

Not wanting to be “disintermediated” by Oodle, SimplyHired, WorkZoo, Indeed and other existing and potential classifieds aggregators, Yahoo!—as reported on several sites—has developed its own metasearch for jobs.

As the copy on the site suggests, and notwithstanding all the rhetoric about vertical search, consumers fundamentally don’t want to search “dozens of sites.” Instead they want convenience and efficiency.

Going forward, classifieds/listings providers (newspapers, Yellow Pages, verticals) will have to confront aggregators in one form or another. Are they merely additional distribution or do they dilute the brand? Smart consumers may start to wonder, “Why go to an individual site when I can get everything from Aggregator X?”

By the same token the aggregators will have to differentiate from one another and figure out how they’re going to make money. (Read: consolidation coming.) There are essentially two ways to do that: offer the best user experience (Oodle, for example, has lots of refinement options, personalization and alerts) and/or the most comprehensive data set (impossible to do in fact; here perception is reality).

Recruitment ad spending in print newspapers was worth US$4.6 billion in 2004 according to the NAA. The Kelsey Group estimates that 2004 online jobs-related spending was approximately US$800 million—the largest of the main classifieds categories.

Yahoo! brings a trusted consumer brand to the equation. The question now is: will CareerBuilder (newspaper-owned) and Monster follow Yahoo! and begin scraping or otherwise collecting data from other sites as a defensive strategy?

Greg Sterling is managing editor of The Kelsey Group. He also leads The Kelsey Group’s the Interactive Local Media program, focusing on local search. Greg came to The Kelsey Group from TechTV’s “Working the Web,” the first national television show dedicated to e-business and the Internet.

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Yahoo! Adds Metasearch to HotJobs

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