I’ve been working on the Job Search Engine for Yahoo! India (http://in.jobs.yahoo.com) since the early part of this year. The site is currently in Beta and we’re improving on a variety of different and new things for the product.
All along, we’ve tried to focus consistently on delivering the core value of the site – which is, to make it easier for the job seeker to discover the most relevant jobs across the universe of jobs for Indians and in India.
Sometime early this year, IAMAI, the Internet and Mobile Association of India published a research study on the demographics of the 6.5 Million Online Job Seekers of India. Get the Report (PDF) It talks about a strong growth in the online recruitment industry, from the Rs. 145 Crores, in 2005-06 to Rs. 241 Crores, in 2006-07! Now, that’s a neat 60%+ growth, and how? On the internet usage part, Email, Surfing and Search are the top 3 activities among the surveyed group. Next in rung are News online and Chatting.
We’ve seen Naukri go on TV with their Job Show, Monster India coming out with a face-lifted product, Career Builder starting Indian operations this year. One can expect to see interesting action in this space.
It will be interesting to see how vertical searches, Yahoo! India Job Search and the other search engines entering the various verticals, play out in these growing markets. My view is that for the person who’s serious about search (and I define ’serious’ as “An intent to complete an activity – get right info, start/finish a socially valuable transaction”), is likely to be a user of the Vertical Search products, rather than plain jane web search.
Talking about Vertical Searches, web searches are still likely to be “entry points” for most searches. Take this example of a simple search for ‘bangalore chennai flights‘. The first result is something from FareChase, Yahoo!’s travel search product. Now, given the kind of information that search engines usually collect, it’s going to be a neat entry for vertical search results to bubble up the top of keyword search where vertical-content is most relevant.
We live in interesting times 
