SE Industry Staff Cuts - Odd News

What are your thoughts on what has been happening?

[Eric_Lander]

Recently, it seems as though the SE's are hiring new execs, cutting their staff a tremendous amount, and making what I see as very odd business decisions...

• Teoma was bought by Jeeves. Yet Jeeves, just prior, announced possible layoffs and a substantial loss of cashflow.

• Inktomi revamps inclusion partnerships

• GoTo makes a name change

• About.com CEO, Kurnit, no more

• AltaVista drops CEO, announces major staff cuts...

...just a few recent examples. Seems like there is more and more happening now on a continual basis.

Any thoughts?

[IanTurner]

They are beginning to come to the end of their venture capital investments and realise that the business has to actually make some money!!

[Eric_Lander]

Ian:

Good point!

[Brett_Tabke]

I think the shake is good in the long term. I was really worried at first when it started happening. Then we say some recent new engines such as WiseNut and Teoma come on board to fill a much needed gap. That in turn has put pressure back on the bigger engines to shape up. Their market isn't as secure as they thought. This is a good thing.
Even as there are layoffs and changes, it pays to stay informed (thanks):
[topsitelistings.com...]

[Marshall]

Isn't this rather a finite field. After all, how many search engines do we really need?

[Brett_Tabke]

I think we need more than we have now. There are many segments of the web that are poorly covered by the search engines. I still think the next wave is niche engines that out perform 'the big boys'. I think Google is onto something with there Gov, Linux, Mac, and Edu niche searches. I keep hoping they will expand that more aggressively into other topic areas.

It's not just about article quality content, there is something to be said for raw coverage. The current crop of se's - behind Googles lead - have rushed to the link pop and off the page criteria. That has artificially boosted the larger sites into prominence on many se's. Finding that rare, poorly linked, high quality site is still important. The current crop mostly ignore those pages. Even Google has to put in a 'cheat factor' for .edu domains to give them the significance they deserve.

Niche engines and expert niche databases are the next wave.

[heini]

To further divert from the original theme:
What about Meta Engines? Specialised Metas searching theme specific directories and engines should become more important also.
There is however the ever looming question of revenue: A good expert directory/SE is expensive to maintain, and there is still no way to make users pay... The #1 problem for content providers on the web!

[Eric_Lander]

You bring up the age old question it seems heini, that is, how can SE's make their money.

Obviously banner ads and soon too, popups, will lose their effectiveness if they ever had any. As more advertisers notice the clickthroughs decrease, more pull their ad campaigns on various sites. Including engines.

The advertising industry itself has taken a large hit in the past year or so, which throws a wrench into it all. Add that dot-com fallout, and more turmoil suddenly exists.

Perhaps we, as SEO's can devise a way that not only makes money for the engines, but allows our work to be well received.

What if hosting providers needed to subscribe to SE's indexing services? In other words, an SE's agents, be it a robot, spider, or crawler, wouldn't access a site unless it's mapped IP was within a netblock belonging to a subscriber. Then though, that would make our lives very hellatious I suppose... Mark that down as a bad idea...

But it does make you think.

Brett, I hope you liked the article. I can't stress enough the importance of continuous learning. There's a reason we have coffee aound 24-7! ;)

[Eric_Lander]

"Niche engines and expert niche databases are the next wave." -BT

Brett, I think you are absolutely correct. I was amazed (and still am sometimes) when IXQuick came out and began indexing more resources. I often wonder what role P2P apps though will play a role in this. Gnutella technology alone is quite amazing, and already adapted to work as a web-based, realtime search index. This proves to be something to watch for sure.