Vertical search

A couple of days ago Indeed announced a partnership with Info.com that will integrate the 100,000s of jobs that Indeed has into Info.com's aggregated search engine. (In Australia Sensis is doing a similar thing to Info.com). An interesting convergence of tools.

This got me thinking about comparing Indeed with SimplyHired, an interesting question. How does one judge the results returned by these meta search tools? Or is it just the results that are important, what about additional tools and services? So let's take a look.

I ran the same search on both tools, SAP Project Manager located in New York. Indeed returned 456 jobs, while SimplyHired had 705 jobs. An interesting result given Indeed has been in the market for several more months then SimplyHired. However looking closer SimplyHired looks within 25 miles of the location entered, I did not see the same for Indeed although their advance search sets the distance at 25 miles by default so I would guess that this is their default setting.

Indeed has several very useful features for a job seeker. Firstly they automatically prompt you to refine your search, I assume based on information they have gather from other searches. Indeed also provides several sets of statistics on the job market which might be of interest to a job seeker. They also provide a jobroll service via their published web services that allow several different uses.

SimplyHired also provides services and tools for job seekers. Firstly they are getting users to rate the quality of the results returned. While not being used now in the future could provide for some interesting personalised features. They also allow the job seeker to filter their results by company or different market segment, such as Fortune 100 Fastest Growing. Possibly the biggest feature is the recently announced partnership with LinkedIn. Which allows the job seeker to see who they know that might help them get the job. (I plan to post a bit more about LinkedIn later today.)

So then which results are best? Like the regular search engines it is hard to tell and a very personal choice. I would suggest that job seekers use both services so that they do not limit themselves.

Of course let's not forget RSSJobs, however RSSJobs seems to only search a single source and requires users to pay a subscription for usage.

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