Indeed Follows Oodle Launch in Jobs Arena
Indeed.com formally launches on the same day as Oodle, offering meta-search for Jobs. Here's the announcement.
Indeed is one of several new meta-search job sites.
Indeed and Oodle represent efforts to consolidate and integrate the consumer experience and away from silos or "verticalization." In another context, it's identical to what AOL has attempted to do with Pinpoint Travel.
Indeed.com is one of the "open search" feeds available as a button on A9.
The battle is on to see who will own the user/consumer. It's being waged across the Web — even, somewhat paradoxically, as more and more sites are sharing their data and information with distribution partners.
The question is: are you simply looking for distribution for your advertisers or are you trying to drive consumer traffic and be a destination site? (They're not identical strategies.)
Even though distribution is critical, it's important for newspapers and IYP sites to remain viable destinations.
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It will also be interesting to see what the commercial "end games" of such meta-search sites will be. Their launch missions to empower consumers, for free, and help listings sites, for free, are undoubtedly not their sole missions. One sure commercial winner is apparently Google, as its ads often appear on the sites.
The ad models are in question. They can't exist on AdSense revenue alone.
A piece in MediaPost even questioned the legality of these sites on the basis that they're mining arguably copyrighted material.
The recent, high-profile, meta-search site launches do appear to utilize the same poaching techniques of “scraping content†to support a Ad Sense, or other sponsored search engine listing format, model similar to the methods employed by fly-by-night “directory†sites that are corrupting Google’s algorithmic search results (Google’s ads also generally appear on such “directory†sites), frustrating the search engine optimization efforts of SMEs and undoubtedly giving users a tiresome runaround the Web.