Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion

Yahoo! has introduced an interesting solution to the search landscape. It’s called Yahoo Mindset.

The gist of it is that users can customize their search results between Shopping and Researching.

Google launched a similar personalization beta over a year ago that never really caught people’s imagination. Therefore, it’ll be interesting to see if Yahoo! Mindset will succeed.

For SEOs who focus on e-commerce customers and driving buyers to online shopping centers, this kind of personalization could throw all kinds of monkey-wrenches into the search engine optimization game. Studies still show that the majority of buyers still prefer to research online, then buy offline.

Yahoo! Mindset could enable shoppers to bisect the e-commerce sites and jump right to the informational ones. From there, they can go to their local Best Buy and pick-up the latest HP computer.

For jobs and online recuitment, the impact is a little less concrete. That said, such a technology could shift attention to direct employers as opposed to job sites, if search engines decide that job boards are more shopping-focused than research-focused.

For example, a search for Cleveland nursing jobs swings between all job sites on the Shopping side, but is less so on the Researching end. The Researching option even includes direct employer The Cleveland Clinic’s Web site.

So, if this type of search technology evolves toward job boards being more on the Shopping side vs. direct employers being more on the Researching end, then what side do job seekers gravitate toward?

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