In 2010 we decided to move back from London to Sydney and to aide that move I took a position of leading the vertical search development work at Yahoo!7. Vertical Search is web search but restricted to a specific data set, i.e.: data that a property/website is presenting to it’s users. The main aim is to provide another content access tool to the users to find content and of-course to monetise the process. The process of implementing this for a given data set is rather interesting as it involves understand the data set, what metadata is captured for each item, how the website itself is structured, creating indexes, creating appropriate ranking profiles and building the search user interface.

Over a short period of time (not to blow my own trumpet here) I was able to understand the inner workings Y!7 and make a dent in their search roadmap. I lead the implementation for Yahoo!7 Sports, Yahoo!7 Lifestyle and Yahoo!7 TV.

A few month’s back I had heard rumblings about a startup (of sorts) in Sydney which was going gang busters within the e-commerce space called BigCommerce. BigCommerce is a e-commerce SAAS platform which enables a Joe Blog to create a e-commerce presence for their business. The setup is a short process and importantly without the need to invest technical resources.

To cut a long story short, after 3 gruelling interview rounds I accepted their offer. The main attraction for me is to be in an environment where everyone is working on the same product and pulling in the same direction. This, based on my experience, is generally possible with small/startup companies and I am really looking forward to starting and getting my hands dirty again. The other attraction was working in the SAAS space, it’s not something I have done in this shape before and I am really excited by the challenge.

This news, given that I took the plunge, is very heartening indeed! If you are interested or know anyone who is then look here for open positions.

Onwards forwards!