14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo is still trying to find its ‘essence’ and one thing is for sure, search isn’t it. The company has said as much with CEO Carol Bartz going as far as claiming that Yahoo was never about search. That’s a bit of history rewriting, but one thing’s for sure, the company is searching for greener pastures. So what’s it to do with the hundreds of engineers it had working at its search engine now that it’s outsourced the heavy lifting to Microsoft. Well, the obvious, it’s letting them go. The company has confirmed a new wave of layoffs at its search team.
“Yahoo! remains focused on innovating the overall Search experience over the long-term, and the Yahoo! Search group is hard at work on some new experiences that we believe will convert Yahoo! users to Yahoo! searchers. To accomplish our new product objectives, we have decided that we need a different combination of talent and are making changes within the search group in order to more deeply invest in other areas of the group,” Yahoo said in a statement.
Yahoo hasn’t said how many people it’s firing. The company had previously said that changes would happen within the search team, after the deal with Microsoft was announced. The plan was to move some 400 engineers over to the Redmond company, though there’s no word on how that is going.
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz promised that the layoffs were over last fall, after three major waves, but she also said that the search partnership would likely include some layoffs.
Microsoft and Yahoo signed a deep partnership on search last year. When the deal is finished, Bing will provide all searches for Yahoo properties. The two search engines will remain separate, but will be powered by the same technology. With the focus at Yahoo Search on the design and user experience, those working on the actual indexer and ranking algorithm found themselves without a purpose at the company.