Job portals and the coming shake out

There was this news item at the google news portal that made me (even jaded ol' me) sit up. Apparently Naukri.com is planning to enter other portal businesses like real estate, education and e-commerce. After Jeevansaathi.com (the matrimonial portal) is this the new lines of business that Naukri is targetting? Makes sense, because thankfully people don't go through the matrimonial process as frequently as they change jobs (at least not yet !!!).

But a search on google for Real estate India brings up indiaproperties.com and abodesindia.com . Naukri.com's success was in being the first job portal to come up in India and building Monster-like functionality before Monsterindia.com became a reality. With the result that Monster had to resort to the acquisition of Jobsahead.com to compete with Naukri.com

I tend to think (as do others on the blogosphere, specially Online Recruitment expert Joel Cheesman) that the existing model of job search portals is due for a big overhaul, with vertical search becoming more and more pronounced, social networking meeting job search (think Linkedin.com partnership with simplyhired.com or the cool Jobster.com), and 800 pound gorillas like google and yahoo getting into the game with personalized search is skewing the field as Joel says.

And in this scenario I got a mail from someone called Himanshu asking me to review a site called Bixee. And I was pleasantly surprized to find a vertical job search engine like indeed but focussed on India. It needs some work, like an advanced search function (e.g. to distinguish between Jammu the city and Jammu & Kashmir the state!), but it's quite good to start with and gives Indian job hunters better reach, focussing on aggregating from 16 India focussed jobs sites. The only doubt in my mind is their ability to make revenue. I only wish they persist and get ready for the Google.co.in onslaught when (and not if) it comes.