The Portal Threat To Verticals (and How To Beat It)

There are a lot of exciting developments in specialized search these days. Shopping search, job search, social bookmarking, classifieds, local search, and more. Quite a few startups have gained enough momentum to attract funding and followings of loyal early adopters.

Simply Hired, for example), can reach a point of overreliance on portal exposure. If a portal player is interested in acquiring them, they can "play God" with the amount of exposure those vertical players get via organic search referrals month to month, as a reminder of who calls the shots. After all, they can tweak results pages to send more traffic to their own internal properties, as Yahoo now does with Hotjobs (formerly an independent in its own right, acquired by Yahoo). And they can ape the innovators, as Hotjobs has just done in that resembles models pursued by the upstarts. Even if you want to pay for placement, Yahoo might throw up roadblocks -- they can exert editorial control over which keywords are even for sale. Local search players like Andrew Goodman is Principal of Traffick.com, an acclaimed "guide to portals" which foresaw the rise of trends such as paid search and semantic analysis.