Yahoo Does Meta Search

File this one under things I thought would never happen in my lifetime, for good reason. Yahoo jumps into the vertical search market with it's new job search engine offering at HotJobs. Wow, I thought I'd never see a major search engine degrade itself by scraping other site's industry specific data but I guess that's what crawlers are all about anyway, right? The main difference is that meta search engines [unlike normal general purpose search engines] focus on a specific theme and pull in content in hopes it will be able to aggregate the most popular site's data in a single interface. In meta search 1.0 days it was nothing more than a grouped output but these days meta search is beginning to manipulate the data and even apply their own algorithms to the data before they present it.

It will be interesting to see how this turns out from a brand / marketing standpoint for Yahoo, I'm not too thrilled and don't foresee a time when Google will ever follow suit but you never know.