Yahoo has been taking a great deal of flap for their decision to allow their HotJobs search engine to scrape job listings from other sites. The general consensus among many bloggers is that this is a poor choice on Yahoo’s behalf, which leads to a question: Why?
Why is Yahoo’s additional method of populating their job index such a big deal? It’s no different than sending out a spider to peruse the web in order to bring back listings for the search index. Or is it? Depends on whom you ask. Jason Dowdell, Om Malik and the Silicon Beat blog feel that it is, but to a man, not one of them explains the difference between this and populating a normal search index.
What other method would they suggest? Perhaps limiting the HotJob listings to submissions and paid partnerships is one way, but the method they are employing now ensures they have a more comprehensive index. Is there anything wrong with that, other than the fact that another job engine use the same method? Is it Yahoo’s lack of innovation that’s bothering everyone?
he bottom line for any search engine is having a comprehensively stocked index. If “scraping” is how you have to do it, then so be it. Again, this method is no different than using a spider to increase an index. It’s not like Yahoo is trying to mislead or trick anyone. The jobs in the HotJobs index are legitimate listings, not bogus, so why all the fuss?
To compare HotJobs to a meta-engine seems incorrect. The HotJobs listings are crawled and then added. The query results are not being served from another source, they just originate from a different one. I never thought I’d see an organic method of populating an index, be it job or otherwise, would come under such fire.
Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for Murdok. Visit Murdok for the latest search news.
