Matt Cutts made a post on his blog on Tuesday directly addressing Yahoo engineers who might be interested in moving to Google. This sparked a strong response from the blog’s readers, raising a number of valid questions. One of the respondents was a recruiter for Yahoo who posted that Yahoo was having a ‘hiring bonanza’ and in the spirit of fair competition, Matt Cutts approved the comment and allowed the recruiter to post his twitter contact details.
So what is this Google drive for Yahoo engineers? It could be seen as a direct drive to poach the competition’s best engineers or it could be that Google are ‘desperate’ as one blogger commented on the Matt Cutts blog. However it is much more likely that Matt Cutts and Google are just not bothered about Yahoo because they are not currently real competition, especially since Microsoft’s deal with the search engine in July 2009.
We reported on strange fluctuations in Yahoo’s UK results and they seemed to be leaning toward keyword rich URLs about three weeks ago. With Microsoft seemingly focussing on Bing’s progress, it might well have left Yahoo swinging in the breeze. Our current take on the search engine’s can be summed up crudely by the following:
Google – Usability
Bing – Ooh flashy
Yahoo – If you’ve accidently installed it via AVG
Could be interpreted as a little bit harsh, but when you look at the market domination, it really doesn’t seem like Matt Cutts is going to defect anytime soon. That is unless he wants a real challenge. The sentiment was repeated a couple of times on the Matt Cutts blog along with a surprise that Yahoo employees were not under a contractual obligation to not work for a competitor within the industry for a designated amount of time.
The pick of the bunch was “find good homes for those Yahoo Search people. Regardless of how the company has been managed, Yahoo has attracted some incredible search folks, and it would be a shame to see their talents go to waste.”
We agree with this comment, with the MS search deal the future is uncertain and many would not be surprised if Yahoo search was absorbed into Bing at some point, which would mean Yahoo search engineers working for Microsoft, perhaps many of them would prefer to move to Google. It makes you think what they could have acheived with decent management and a clear message like Google.
Ebay obviously feels a similar way as it was reported by the Rimm-Kaufman Group that Google had ‘flipped the switch’ on their Yahoo ads, with Google ads now accounting for 90% of their advertisements. To call Yahoo a sinking ship might be a bit of a sensationalist statement, however the most recent stats from Hitwise show over a 90% market share in volume:
Although this is one source, it holds up when looking at the stats of the HP Group site. 61.53% came from Google and 18.07% came direct, however under 3% came from Bing and Yahoo. This again confirms Google’s dominance in the search market and similar trends can be seen from other online sources.
This all points toward the fact that Google does not need to worry about having their search engineers poached by Yahoo recruitment reps and kudos to Matt Cutts for his bold and forthright recruitment strategy.
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