Singapore Entrepreneurs

Recently, Ian Timothy wrote an analysis of a gap in market need which current solutions have failed to provide for: online search for hotel accommodation in Singapore. Inspired by that entry, our other resident contributor, Der Shing, offers some interesting questions on how the metasearch framework can be extended to online advertising as a whole.

Contributed by Der Shing

Was inspired by a hotel meta search site I found recently thanks to a link from sgentrepreneurs blog. I am curious what readers think of meta search engines. I understand the problem they seek to face. That is to say, too many sources of information, no single site that can be a good starting point etc etc. But I have thought quite hard about this and I cannot see how meta search will work without becoming like the very search engines they seek to replace. I say so based on what I can see in the jobs classifieds space which is my area.

I know there have been quite a few meta search sites on jobs. You have recruitnet, newchinacareers, indeed, simplyhired etc. They have crawlers which visit employer and online job boards to gather jobs and post it on their site. I suppose they have some intelligence to remove duplicate postings. They are usually with a clean interface which uses AJAX in some way. All that is fine. So assuming all that is achieved, the next step is that they need to earn money.

And so far the way they earn money is via google ads, or their own CPC or CPM ad system for job boards or employers. This is where the problems kick in. I could be missing something here, so do let me know.

Problems:

• 1) Why would any employer want to advertise with you if they know they can get on your portal simply by posting on the job board or company career site which you crawl anyway? If it is for better positioning and better location, then you will need a sales team to do the convincing of each employer in each country just like any job board. Not saying it cannot be done, but you need a sales team.
• 2) And if you do convince some employers to advertise on CPC or CPM basis, can it be significant? Do not forget HR are not marketing people. Getting them to post online was hard enough, but selling CPC and CPM which requires tracking on a not-that-huge an issue (online recruitment) may not be attractive.Also, what is to stop employers/job boards from blocking your crawler IP and/or sending legal cease/desist orders? If you are based in some other country, then it is not so bad, but as mentioned above, if you intend to sell, then you got to have some local presence.
• 3) Branding. A meta search engine branding will never be strong in each local market. Esp in SEA. And I think to sell well, you need a branding strategy per company. That means local presence and local marketing. Reason is that each country already has large incumbents spending money marketing.
• 4) Two groups to crawl from. Employers are not so bad but that means many SMEs are missing. But employers side, you run the risk of being sued or blocked, unless you get permission to crawl which can be done but is more tedious. On Job boards side, they will let you crawl for as long until you start to snatch meaningful direct employer revenue from them. Once this happens, IP blocks, lawsuits sure to follow. So if I were a metasearch, I have to do all crawling with permission. If I do not, I must be prepared to lose a chunk of jobs and handle legal issues.

So I think metasearch (for jobs at least to succeed in SEA will need to end up looking a lot like a regional job board. With sales and marketing offices in each country and a large budget to boot. The metasearch part becomes just like a marketing tool to perhaps be more viral is gathering job seekers but the work to ensure authenticity and non-duplication of jobs is quite intense. What do readers here think? If we replace jobs with hotels or some other word, is the above still relevant?

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