I wonder what Dan Finnegan meant?
February 8th, 2008 — Arul SundaramDan Finnegan, the former head of Yahoo’s HotJobs property, is quoted in the NY Times today saying this:
Businesses like travel, shopping, music and even HotJobs were all great products, but none were going to make a huge difference in the fight with Google unless we used them to drive the main search business.
HotJobs has been the main focus of the Yahoo / Newspaper consortium to date. While, in the short-run, HotJobs did get Yahoo the ability to distribute search onto all their newspaper partner sites, is that how Dan meant the quote? My experience has been that Dan’s sentiment generally = vertical search (or, more accurately, Universal Search). It’s about driving query volume for the core search property. If that’s actually the case - and Yahoo is starting to focus on driving core search volume at the expense of their “local” verticals - how much will that hurt help their newspaper partners?
Ken Doctor and Terry Heaton have been providing good insight into the Yahoo - Newspaper consortium for some time now.
February 11th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
I think there’s a couple of different things as play here. From what I understand, Yahoo expected to get more search traffic from the verticals and their deals with the newspapers than was actually the case. Which makes sense, in one way. The primary search traffic you’re going to get from something like HotJobs is internal searches, and for some reason, Yahoo execs thought that wouldn’t be the case. And search within classifieds has always been problematical.
But the other side of this is that Yahoo in general is undertaking a real collapse back to its core search business. I’m not sure I entirely agree with the move, but Yahoo has certainly spent a lot of time and resources on ideas that were either thrown casually into the market or never left Beta.
Yahoo still has a solid business in display search, and it does make sense that they retrench a bit. My hunch is that the future of the newspaper consortium will depend on whether or not Microsoft ends up acquiring Yahoo.