Yahoo Hotjobs begins scraping job boards, papers, corporate sites for recruitment ad inventory

Yahoo has entered the vertical search market, quietly launching a vertical search engine on its HotJobs recruitment site. Now, a job search turns up listings from HotJobs advertisers first, but also includes listings from other job boards and from employer sites.



The move makes Yahoo the first among the major search engines to enter the burgeoning ñ and competitive ñ vertical search market, and gives the company first-mover advantage over Google, which is widely believed to be developing a classifieds program of its own.

The HotJobs vertical search works by first presenting HotJobsí postings on the results pages, followed by other listings. HotJobsí own listings are further ranked to present the ads of HotJobsí sponsors first. These sponsored job listings are a recent addition to the HotJobs site, though they are common on both Yahooís and Googleís search results pages. Vertical search sites like SimplyHired, WorkZoo and Indeed similarly aggregate listings from other sites, but present them based on how closely each posting matches the search criteria. Their order is based on mathematical relevancy. HotJobs is a premium style ranking, but within each grouping results are ranked by relevancy.

A search of several common job descriptions turned up postings from niche sites, regional and local job boards, newspaper sites and from some employers. Missing, however, were listings from Monster, CareerBuilder or other major job boards.

Yahooís vertical search was introduced overnight June 30 without any announcement. First public disclosure was made today by blogger Joel Cheesman on his recruitment blog at http://cheesman.typepad.com/seo/.

Yahoo officials issued a statement saying: ìWe are testing the implementation of a new job search engine that enables job-seekers to find jobs from across the Internet at www.hotjobs.com. In addition to providing advertised job listings on the Yahoo HotJobs site, we are employing our leading search technology to crawl the Internet, offering job seekers listings from other employer and job-related Web sites. We are still in a testing phase and will keep you informed of any announcements.î

It is too early to tell how this changes the recruitment market. However, Dave McClure, marketing director for SimplyHired.com, said it ìAccelerates the tension on the space.î Having Yahoo incorporate vertical search into HotJobs is, McClure said, ìa validation that (the vertical search sites are) going in the right direction. Itís going to take a lot more than just search to build a site. Itís a minimum standard.î What he means is that when multiple sites present all the same jobs the differentiator will be the community and networking connections the sites offer. SimplyHired has partnered with LinkedIn to provide job seekers the opportunity to see who in the LinkedIn network may have a connection to the company posting the job.