This is not the same (boards/aggregators) as Yelp, HN, Reddit, Stackoverflow or various other user generated content review sites.

This is because most if not all the jobs come from the companies website. They are a search middleman similar to how Google is for almost everything else. They don't provide an ecosystem like say HN, Stackoverflow, Yelp, etc. In some ways they steal the content.

Sites like Indeed are basically doing the same thing that Google really should have been doing.

Now the boards/aggregators tried to provide "ecosystems" but they could never get it right because when people are looking for the job they are desperate and just don't give a... (or at least that is my theory. its also why linkedin works because its is passive).

I have noticed through our metrics (and I'm biased because we make job web sites for companies that hire) that the best candidates (despite what Indeed says) come from going directly to your website or come from LinkedIn (assuming non referral based).

If you are wondering how then Indeed/Career Builder et al do so well its that its hard to measure actual success (ie source to hire). It should be easy but sadly its not (don't have time for the details).

So what these guys provide is ton of traffic with lots of noise. Traffic that google could have easily provided.

So honestly I think it is sort of good they fail.

The big companies post all of their jobs on their website, but the smaller companies definitely do not. In developing countries it is even worse. In India it is common for jobs to be posted on a website as PDFs, which are scan/images of printed pages.

There is added value. Indeed, and plenty of other job sites, have done things like quick apply which bypasses the horrific process of legacy ATSs like Oracle's Taleo.

People, in the most general sense, should be extremely concerned if Google -- or any specific company -- gains a market hold on job search / recruiting.

If, say Google and Facebook, or Google and LinkedIn had control of 90% of the hiring vertical they could, in effect, take a large chunk of an employee earnings. How? Employers would have to spend a lot of money just for the employee to know some opportunity exists for them. Big, high margin, corporations would be just fine. Small businesses would be disadvantaged.

This is what has happened with the travel aggregators. Two companies dominate (and own all of the other travel search engines you think are independent.) The big hotel chains can negotiate slightly better deals, the small ones pay full price for visibility.

In a more narrow definition we can see this with on demand work start ups. Uber, Postmates, and others have spend massive amounts of money to recruit workers. Of course as start ups they have time constraints and geography constraints. They need to grow really fast so they pay tens of millions of dollars on buying search ads, display ads, and so on. Perhaps they could grow organically but it would be hard.

A good job search / recommendation would just show users the best economic opportunities for them at this moment. Yes, it would be hard to rank and filter out stuff that looks good but is crap (Maybe Uber falls in the crap category?) However, if someone wants to work, certainly they shouldn't be sitting at home idle because a potential employer didn't spend millions of dollars on an ad campaign. (Those "reach" dollars should be going to workers, not platforms.)

(re: travel aggregators) Isn't one of those companies ITA software which was bought by Google a couple of years ago? Which is the other one: Expedia or Priceline? What about CheapOair? Hipmunk?

When somebody claims there's a duopoly in online travel agents, they are generally referring to the priceline group and expedia.

I had heard a while back (from a startup client I did some consulting work for (built and delivered a prototype), and who was in the HR/Job web app space), that Indeed.com was bought for ~$1bn by Recruiter.com . I wonder if they made money back on that buy.

Indeed was purchased by Recruit Holdings, which is a massive Japanese conglomerate. As far as I'm aware, it has been a success.

http://www.recruit-rgf.com/

Interesting ...

I have mixed views about this. I see your point that its definitely an unfair advantage to Google since its the default search engine and can gather so much data. But the existing job sites (indeed, for example) have done a piss poor job so far. I guess what I'm saying is: I would have been a lot more concerned if Indeed was amazing and Google stepped in specifically to destroy it before it got too big (like MS did with IE and Netscape).

I agree with you, and my views are also mixed - maybe this isn't the best example where the current solutions aren't that great.

But where do you draw the line? It's fine when all the available solutions aren't that great?

What would you expect indeed to provide that it doesn't already?

Does this result in a better or worse user experience?

Personally I don't care if a company built atop of Google fails.

The only thing I care about is consumer welfare, and good quality products + lower prices.

The thing is - and Peter Thiel actually makes a good point about this in Zero To One, when it comes to monopoly's - a monopoly is healthy as long as it invests into technology development, because they have the financial muscle to do it.

This kind of development is a vertical leap? I don't see it like such... just like I don't see it when Amazon brings their branded products to category's that are doing well.

I don't say Google, Amazon, don't invest in proper tech development - but this kind of development is just to establish themselves deeply at the cost of their user base.

I feel split in this subject honestly - on one side, why can't they leverage something of their own? On the other hand, that's when things start to get shady.

Since you care about consumer welfare, do you support Google?