The vultures are starting to circle vertical search.
From Bill Burnham: “The first and most immediate set of losers will be the start-up vertical search players (indeed one can only imagine the long faces at Trulia (and their VC backers) when they got their first look at Google Real Estate). Of course losers may not be an accurate term as the correct response to Google Base from these companies should be to pick up the phone and call Yahoo, Microsoft, IAC, and AOL and say ‘you guys need to buy us because Google is going to clean your clock’ and who knows some of the big boys might just hit the panic button and write a few big checks.
“The problem for these vertical search players is that Google has set a very high bar by integrating its vertical search seamlessly into it’s free text query engine, crawler farm, and data base. If a Yahoo or Microsoft, were to buy several different vertical search start-ups to respond to Google Base (and they must respond one way or the other) they would inherit a huge integration headache and be faced with a massive back-end restructuring. Faced with this headache, some of them may well decide to follow in Google’s footsteps and built it from scratch. Alternatively, they may prefer to acquire a more ‘horizontal’ vertical search play, such as Vast, which has already built a multi-vertical crawl and classify engine. Either way, if I were running a vertical search engine I would be putting a sign on my front door right about now reading ‘No reasonable offers refused.’”
Is he right? Time will tell.
Clearly Google Base is now the cobra to the vertical search engine mongoose. Technically, Google has held this label for a long time, it’s just that now the snake is officially out of the basket.
The key for Indeed, SimplyHired, Jobster and others is to be more than just jobs (or be acquired). I know each would articulately argue that they already are more than job listings (Jobster’s referral model being the best), but in the end, consumers will be the ones who decide each vertical engine’s fate - even more so than Google.
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