Sensis kills its search, uses Google

Telstra subsidiary Sensis announced today that it would cease developing its local search engine, Sensis.com.au, instead using Google's engine to drive the site.

Sensis CEO Bruce Akhurst said the transfer was motivated by cost. "I should clarify that [Sensis search] has been a profitable business throughout the last couple of years, but we will be taking the costs out of that and using the Google technology."

Akhurst denied there would be lay-offs as a result of axing search development at Sensis. "We've got a lot of online activity, we have one of the biggest online businesses in the country, of course, so [the employees] will be well and truly utilised within the Sensis group."

Previous SEO modifications based on Google have significantly increased Sensis' online traffic, said Ackhurst.

"For the last couple of months we have had search engine optimising appearing on our Yellow sites ... that in itself has resulted in the fantastic result of over a million extra users per month to the Yellow Pages online site," he said.

Karim Temsamani, the Australian managing director of Google, said that the search results that appeared on a Sensis search would be "no different to the way the listings appear on Google.com.au, with sponsored results and organic results appearing as well when people do a search on Sensis.com.au".

Temsamani said the transfer to the Google search platform "would be replicated through [various] sites including BigPond.com". Revenue from the deal would be shared between Google and Sensis.

Temsamani denied this signalled any takeover of Telstra by Google, but said that the proposition was an "interesting question".