Dan 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.
