• by Shankar Gupta , August 9, 2005

The New York Times Company, along with Union Square Ventures and Allen & Company, LLC, Monday announced that it has purchased a minority interest in the job site meta-search engine Indeed.com for $5 million.

Martin Nisenholtz, the New York Times Company's senior vice president of digital operations, said that adding online assets to the current job sites--including Jobmarket.NYtimes.com and BostonWorks.com--potentially shores up money lost in the print classifieds space. "Obviously, jobs-wanted advertising is an important category of advertising for us, and we believe that the area of vertical search offers great promise," Nisenholtz said. We have job boards, we have job sites--but we just felt we wanted to have an interest in... this new area of job inquiry as well."

Indeed.com, which launched in November of this year, is a meta-search engine site for jobs--crawling more than 1,000 other sources, such as job sites, online classifieds, and the hiring sections of companies' home pages.

Nisenholtz said the Times Company felt that job search was an especially good area for meta-search to aggregate. "In this category, vertical search adds a tremendous amount of value to the search query. It's a particularly good data set upon which to optimize," he said.