Foundering search giant Yahoo is said to be looking to offload its "Hot Jobs" employment listing service for "the right price" in the wake of declining search performance and a pending deal with Microsoft to have that company’s Bing search engine take over search functions on Yahoo’s still-popular internet portal.

Reuters reports that company insiders say that Hot Jobs – in addition to Yahoo’s Small Business unit – was on the block for a hoped-for fee of anywhere between $350 million and $500 million.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, speaking at an investor’s conference earlier this week, joked that Yahoo owed a great debt to Tiger Woods for the revelations about the golfer’s personal life that spiked search traffic across the internet. She also confirmed that Hot Jobs was not central to the company’s strategic vision moving forward and could be sold.

Bartz also blamed the company’s declining search numbers – and consequent diminution of relevance to the search engine optimization (SEO) market – on the failure of toolbar deals with HP and Acer that would have seen Yahoo toolbars pre-installed on PCs manufactured by those companies.

Katherine Griwert is Brafton's Marketing Director. She's practiced content marketing, SEO and social marketing for over five years, and her enthusiasm for new media has even deeper roots. Katherine holds a degree in American Studies from Boston College, and her writing is featured in a number of web publications.