Workhound Job Search Engine Blog

Om Malik is an excellent tech reporter who used some clever HR forensics to sniff out that Hulu might be opening its content internationally (a quite exciting scoop, especially for those who prefer not to spoof). He saw that they were hiring internationally, looked at the job specs, and concluded that this indicated that Hulu was going international.  Smart.

In similar fashion, while conversing about who was taking tenancy in the new Westfield London mall, I took a look at their website which was, typically, coy about their new leaseholders (many landlords like to keep this info on the DL).  But, since staffing is a critical path item, many retailers have already started the recruitment process and with a couple quick searches on a job search engine like, say, Workhound, it was easy to compile a list of the new tenants.

Good search engines take unstructured data by the terabyte and structure it. Which, in our case, can help those looking for a job, trying to benchmark their salary, or even just gathering some business intelligence.

New power rankings have been released for HR related blogs and The Recruiter’s Lounge ended up on top.  The list of finalists provides a great resource for keeping on top of the latest trends in recruitment.

Wm

Having authored some patent applications in the US around business processes for internet commerce, I was always a little bothered by the practice.  A quite good patent law blog has a solid write-up on how the US Patent and Trademark Office is looking at the appropriate scope for providing patents in the area of business process.  Although it’s not quite written for a lay audience, it’s relatively accessible.

Although in traditional business channels, there are a myriad of ways to put up protective walls to impede competition, it’s more difficult to do so on the Net.  Just have to build better products.

Wm

Anita Elberse of Harvard Business School has completed a new look at consumer data to write a piece entitled Should You Invest in the Long Tail?  Her article seems to be written as a corrective to some of the hoopla around Chris Anderson’s book, The Long Tail.  Her article is worth reading but mainly for the quality of her research.  The analysis, however, struck me as often wrong-headed and fairly first level.

When looking at consumer research, what I find interesting are non-intuitive, actionable insights. Elberse’s discovery that, as she modestly states, “may be of intellectual interest to readers,” that there’s money to be made in blockbusters is neither.  A record executive that states “if we just had more platinum records, we’d make more money,” would not be applauded for strategic vision. 

I found the tone of the piece somewhat arch as if Elberse felt it necessary to provide a necessary tonic to the success of Anderson’s book. There’s a hint of straw man building when she suggests “…that it would be imprudent for companies to upend traditional practice and focus on the demand for obscure products.” As if, a Blockbuster executive might put forward the shifting the product off the new release wall and replacing it with the French New Wave.

To look at the Rhapsody data and to come away with the insight that the music that is most popular to music consumers is also of most interest to Rhapsody customers is not that interesting.

That, as Anderson puts in his rather polite response, Rhapsody gets 68% of its demand from titles that are not available in traditional retail stores, is the type of insight could really upend the entertainment media value chain.  Even limited just to the arena of producing more blockbusters, if companies can monetize inventory they had previously written off and find more ways make profits on titles that fail to appeal to a larger audience, they can afford to make more bets and increase their odds of having more blockbusters in their portfolio.

The notion that entertainment co’s might be able rethink their portfolio strategy seems much more useful than Elberse’s advice that “When producing niche goods for the tail end of the distribution, keep costs as low as possible.”

One of the key tenets of the Long Tail was that new modes of distribution were causing a regression towards zero in inventory carrying and transactional costs.  This is why a company like Netflix (NFLX trades at 3x BBI) can have an inventory position vastly superior to a regular video store.  Elberse’s advice that retailers need to “Strictly manage the costs of offering products that will rarely sell,” especially given to retailers who traditionally have operating margins close to 3% and are already very cost focused just doesn’t seem that useful.

In a final dig, noting the delicious irony that Anderson’s ideas were contained in a bestseller, she again (just as her Rhapsody and Quickflix data seem to reinforce Anderson’s thesis) states the obvious and inadvertently makes Anderson’s point.  Publishers were willing to make a surprisingly large bet on a book with a few too many mentions of Power Laws to generally attract a large audience.  In making a large bet, Hyperion signaled their awareness that bestsellers can make money and in Anderson’s case, maybe they took to heart that with new potential audiences for niche content, they had a hedge that allowed them to make the “jaw dropping” offer and subsequently win the bidding war and make a decent return.

As it pertains to recruitment advertising, our Workhound and SalaryTrack sites benefit from investments in data procurement and processing.  A key proposition for is that we provide substantial market coverage and that our data is of sufficient quality and quantity to be useful.  Much of our investment is in processing data records that are found in the Tail of the distribution curve and our users find great value in it.

Wm

Update:  Good Blog post here.

It’s being floated that Microsoft is set to acquire Powerset for £50 million. By adding to their capabilities in turning unstructured data into structured data using better semantic search capabilities, it is hoped that they can improve their search engine results and maybe ad serving tech.  More thoughts on Semantic Search here.

Update:  Ink not on paper just yet.

Taking a look at the new Google Ad Planner.  Seems like a nice vehicle for sourcing new inventory for ad buys and for provding rudimentary campaign management tools.  Be interesting to see how it might level CPMs for smaller publishers.  Not quite sure it will have the qualitative data we
need for our buys but we have applied to beta test it and will keep you posted.

Wm

When Microsoft was being hounded by the DOJ on antitrust issues, Bill Gates continued to put forward, with some audacity, his company’s mission “to get a workstation running our software onto every desk and eventually in every home.”   This signaled to software buyers that MSFT was intent on maintaining their OS as the standard and, to employees, it made clear what their mission was.

Even though the DOJ could have posed a near existential threat, and even though their stated commitment to gaining market share might antagonize the DOJ, MSFT didn’t lose focus. It realized that they couldn’t contol what the DOJ was going to do.  They hired attorneys, stepped up their lobbying efforts, but, most importantly, concentrated on building their business.

One can’t help but feel that Yahoo couldn’t use a little of this focus and bravado.  With their posturing on the MSFT offer, their quite personal responses to Icahn, and their current management exodus (although, to be fair, I haven’t seen good data on whether or not the senior management attrition rate has spiked or is just getting more attention), they still have a terrific business that kicks off nearly $1 billion in free cash flow.

As one reads this blog, there are hundreds of analysts modeling new futures for YHOO. YHOO can spend spend their human capital anticipating and responding to them, and they should have a small team dedicated to this, but other operating units need to stick to their coding.   YHOO can’t control Icahn nor the emergence of new Icahns. If it’s decided that it’s in the shareholders best interest to athwart his takeover bid, then retain counsel, put in poison pill and other defenses and, most importantly, just focus on how to continue to build and monetize great products.
Wm

Update:  MSFT and YHOO flirting again.

Danny Sullivan of the search engine land site does a nice job of parsing May search data here.  His analysis nets out that in several cuts of the data, Google is continuing to dominate the search business.  There is much speculation about whether threats to Google’s dominant market position will bubble up or be met head on.

Our inclination is that it will be a combination of shifting internet usage patterns and a shifting in the notion of what constitutes search.  And we’ve always maintained that Google’s utility in some of the verticals that generate large cash flows is not great.  In travel, classifieds, and services, Google does not offer a great user experience for either the advertiser or information seeker.
Read Write Web, has an interesting piece looking at 11 search trends that may disrupt Google.  In general they are arguing that some of the areas that Google is dominant are very expensive areas to compete in and just not meaningful to end users.  We agree.

Wm

It’s certainly possible the YHOO made the right decision with regards to their newly announced Google deal. They’re smart folks who obviously have deep domain knowledge of their business. Of concern, though, is that this is a tactical but not strategic move. If they were punting on search because they couldn’t match GOOGs ability to capture/structure data that could be a fair concession — they’ve outsourced search tech since the beginning (recall Inktomi et alia).

But, as a content + services company, that relies on monetization, punting to temporarily gain higher CPMs seems like it could hurt them to the core. Offline metaphors are dangerous since the web really is different. But, if News Corp [NWS] through its sales channel and ad inventory position could get higher effective rates than Viacom [VIA], should VIA offer up its inventory? Doesn’t this continue to weaken VIAs relative position? The web isn’t a zero-sum game, YHOOs inventory position is variable, taking more revenue with higher CPMs allows YHOO to invest in other aspects of their business — these elements could make a collection of tactics add up to a successful strategy.

But I think this will undermine their overall advertising position since many of the dynamics that made it difficult for them to compete in search advertising will continue to make it difficult for them in display advertising. There are differences between search and display. But the factors that contribute to GOOGs ability to achieve higher CPMs for search (massive base of advertisers, great contextual ad serving, good campaign management tools) will be utilized to build their display business. My concern is that the millions of businesses that might have used Panama for search and could be upsold into display will just focus on Adwords and, to use a hackneyed expression - sometimes companies move the piano bench when it’s the piano that needs to get moved.

Wm

Not quite sure how I feel about the big Yahoo! announcement. To my mind, the deal raises uncomfortable ontological issues about just who Yahoo! is. If they’re just another publisher, then I guess it might make sense to outsource ad serving to maximize CPMs but as a tech platform, it seems to be a big concession of defeat.

Google’s adsense has a much better UI for media buying and campaign management than Yahoo’s Panama. Google has much better contextual ad serving capabilities, considerably more advertisers, and considerably more distribution. Combined, this enables them to offer publishers higher CPMs than competitive platforms like Panama.

Perhaps Yahoo! is being sly by taking the cash - by their estimates it will increase their topline by about 10% - while they fix Panama. But, Adsense is not just better technology but has far greater economies of scale. It is these two factors combined that make it great for advertisers and publishers. Adding access to Yahoo’s inventory greatly diminishes Yahoo’s competitive position.

Unless, Yahoo really is, at heart, just a publisher. The original Yahoo search functioned like a human editor aided with some database and content management technology. Google took a very different route to making sense of web content and we know how that horse race turned out.

The long tail issue is problematic for Yahoo!. There is a large tech component (relevancy algorithms, data acquisition/structuring) but, I think, it poses even larger scale problem. Allowing Google to sell against the Yahoo inventory greatly exacerbates this.

If General Motors is really just a vehicle finance and distribution company, then it makes sense for them to outsource the development of hybrid engines. But, by doing so, it limits their competitive options. And what exactly does it mean to be a great publisher? News Corp and Viacom produce content that is in great demand but they’ve also built terrific sales organizations. Through acquisitions, both companies have a considerable amount of ad inventory and it is the combination of content, sales, and inventory that allows them to go after big accounts that pay the highest CPMs. Yahoo’s ceding of sales and inventory greatly weakens them even as a publisher.

It is interesting that for Google, as evidenced by their announcement, that their biggest concern is a regulatory one. I think they wisely underplay how this is a great strategic win for them and focus on how the Department of Justice might view the transaction.

I think this deal leaves a couple of questions unanswered: Y? and Who?

Wm

Alley insider has great conference call notes which provide some insight into Yahoo’s thinking.

Update: PaidContent, seattletimes, fred destin, barrons, the deal, the Industry Standard, techcrunch, and valleywag all have additional reporting.

Another Update: Michael Arrington’s withering assessment.

w00t!  We noticed a spike in traffic to our SalaryTrack tool yesterday.  When looking at the source of traffic, we noticed a decent chunk from the Guardian.  This indicated a couple of things.  One that Guardian readers  are certain that they are worth more than they’re currently paid (and who are we to quibble) and that we may have been mentioned in passing in their editorial content. And we were.  They compiled a Top 10 Career Site list and we came in at #4.

We also got a fun mention from and excellent podcast by Broadcasting Online Recruiting News.  They tweak us a little for our Twitter Job feed (but they are a great resource for recruitment information, nonetheless;-) ).

Businessweek looks at a new startup, Glassdoor.com, here. The company has an impressive pedigree and a nice looking site, but we think these types of “review your teacher/company/cafe” products provide anecdotal but not really actionable data. Fine for selecting a muffin but less useful for negotiating a salary.

The use of self-reported survey data is an established protocol for putting together survey reports. But it’s used to make the process of collecting information easier so that more data can be collected. It is well known that self-reported self-selected survey data is much less reliable but if you collect enough of it, it becomes somewhat statistically meaningful.

In the case of glassdoor, the salary data is self-reported from a single company and the data sets per job title are small, it’s fun, anecdotal info but hardly actionable. Knowing what 6 project managers at Google earn, tells one just about nothing about what kind of salary they can expect.

Having hired many project managers at many different salary levels, there are so many different variables we looked at to determine a fair offer that knowing what 6 anonymous individuals say they earn wouldn’t be convincing. With our salarytrack.co.uk tool, we look at millions of data points so that we can provide granularity and actionable salary data - and we’re still hungry for more data just to improve our results.

Our SalaryTrack looks at data for current offers of employment. Unlike survey reports which use historical data, we only display data from current UK job postings.

Data is completely customizable allowing for searches based on any job title, skill, and location. Salary median averages are provided with distribution and percentile charts allowing you to view the salary spread. Additional breakdowns provide an instant view of salaries across the UK regions, and industry sectors.

I really enjoy a good gossip site (valleywag), and often use products like tripadvisor to help select a hotel, and so I think glassdoor could very well become successful but it will not replace a more professional approach to providing salary data

Wm

More on glassdoor here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

At workhound.co.uk we’re not just building better search tools, we also spend a lot of time thinking about search. For the past year, I’ve been doing some research for a book called Google Fried, that looks at how search is having an impact on society. Below, is a quick overview of the book. Any discussion is welcome.

Google Fried
How search engines are rewiring our brains and our understanding of life

Gloss: In the tradition of the Tipping Point and Freakonomics, Google Fried will provide a humorous, accessible, and penetrating look at how tools like Google are having a profound impact on not only on how we think but what we think. With billions of dollars being spent worldwide on brain memory supplements,

books, and games and with Google now the 12th largest company in the world (over 120 million Americans used it just last month), there is a worldwide fascination with the rise of search engines and an overwhelming sense that something profound is happening.

The Opening: Remember in the old days, say 1997, when a conversation about favorite movies might lead to a fairly random 3:00 am outburst of “Shawshank Redemption.” This no longer happens. Thanks to Google, you merely type in “tall guy, Sarandon, prison” and voila, riddle solved and sleeplessness abated. Quality of life enhanced. Or is it?

Maybe, just maybe, the mind likes to puzzle out such memory lapses for a reason. Cognitive exercises have long been used to mitigate the impacts of Alzheimer’s. Neuroscientists sometimes refer to this effect in their technical argot as the use-it-or-lose it phenomenon. Patients are forced to actually try and remember things. But, what happens when an individual no longer needs to use their long-term memory? What is the impact on our one ability to process information as we “outsource” core brain functionality?

What does it mean to society as our brains become Google Fried?

Key Chapters to Include:

How search engines work:
A simple look at Boolean queries, Google’s PageRank system, new search taxonomies, and the evolution of search algorithms.

The rise of Google:
History of search, including early card-catalog systems, Dewey, and others. Key differentiators of major search engines, including Yahoo!, Ask, Local, and the new breed of vertical/meta search engines.

Shifting the Balance from Long Term Memory to the Short Term:

How search tools are shifting the balance from one cognitive modality to the other and how this will impact how individuals store and process information.

Displacing Editors: How Search Algorithms tell you what’s relevant.
The self-reinforcing nature of relevance. The multi-billion dollar “relevance” business. How companies and individuals “game” Google. Cheating Wikipedia and other attempts to modify history. What happens to information deemed “less relevant” and how this impacts our understanding of history and the world around us.

Confirmation Bias – The Rise of Conspiracy Theories on Steroids
How the traditional gate-keepers of “knowledge “ are being displaced by algorithms. How sophisticated search tools make it too easy to reinforce personal theories.

[Read more →]

One of the challenges for a search engine is looking at unstructured data and providing structure for it. At Workhound, we have made a real investment in this capability. Just as we explore other means of presenting search results, we are always exploring other ways of making use of the technology that we’ve developed.

The announcement by Healthline that they were launching a semantic ad network shows that they have been thinking along the same lines. Internet Search is used both to navigate the web to try and make sense of it.

At Workhound.co.uk, our systems look at millions of records every day and try and make sense of them by looking at the position and context of the data and then mapping that against our data tables. This gives our systems a semantic understanding of the records and allows us to present salary and recruitment information in a clear intelligible manner (unlike this paragraph which is laden with buzzwords). It also requires constant tweaking as we encounter new terms and contexts.

It is this semantic capability that we use in our search results and will also be deployed in our semantic ad serving network tools that we are currently testing.

Chart found at this great site.

Yahoo! just announced, as part of their SearchMonkey initiative, the launch of Search Gallery on Wednesday and TechCrunch has a piece on the new and improved (“doesn’t suck”) release of Wikia Search. Both efforts, although they use very different methods, put tools in the hands of the community to offer a better search experience.

It’s quite easy to build a bad search engine, but quite difficult to build a good one. For most job boards, it’s generally not necessary to build good search tools. It is relatively straightforward how to categorize the listings, they can control the data used to make up the listings, and there just aren’t that many jobs to browse through. Newspaper boards fit this profile.

Job boards that start small and grow large, since they don’t have search in their DNA, often offer a poor search experience i.e. a request for a VP job, will usually include jobs that report to a VP or a PA for a VP.

The real challenges for search engines are sourcing then structuring data, developing great relevancy algorithms, then figuring out the presentation layer.

Back to Wikia search, it adds human editors to its use of distributed web service “Grub” for data acquisition/structuring efforts. It has a kind of a “don’t find what you’re looking for then add it” functionality which seems open to abuse and turns the basic notion of of the utility of a search engine on its head. Whereas individuals were willing to put in effort to share their expertise to increase human knowledge, it’s not clear if they’ll be that excited about building a better google. Through the use of AJAX, users can also do some repositioning but the SERPs remain standard issue.

Although the founder talks about it as a potential “google killer,” it seems to me that wikipedia had a much better chance to supplant google although it was stymied with a tricky name, awkward UI, and weak search functionality. For me, my wikipedia requests always start with Google.

Search Monkey, has the potential to enhance the utility Yahoo! search results by giving users more control and options about how they want to have data presented in certain verticals. This could be a stealth way for Yahoo! to bring better vertical offerings to a generalist search tool. At present, there weren’t many break through offerings - visually enhanced summaries of links to linkedin profiles aren’t game changing. That being said, it’s early, and we’ll be closely monitoring these efforts for better ways to present data and we are looking for developers and partners to enhance our workhound listings.

Wm

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) provides great data for determining emerging opportunities in the online advertising space. The IAB/PWC 2007 data for the UK is fascinating. Some highlights:

• 38% Year on Year Growth in UK online advertising spend
• £2.8 billion spent online - now larger than press classifieds and regional newspapers.
• £720 million spent on online recruitment advertising (single largest category - more than 2x automotive)

Enhance Media, another great resource for industry data, suggests that it won’t be until 2009 that the internet will top all competitors (regional, national, and trade press). But they are only looking at the £287 million spent on online recruitment classifieds - less than half the online recruitment spend. Shrewd online advertisers only care about the ROI of their ad purchases. To them, the only distinction between online classified, display, or search advertising is ROI. Hence, it was in early ‘08 that online became king.

But, this only tells part of the story. Online publishers have much higher gross margins, operating margins, and trade at much higher P/Es than traditional publishers. Whereas a national newspaper organization might have a 6-8% operating margin and trade at a P/E of 10-15 which can lead to a chart like this:

An online publisher is likely to have operating margins in the 30-40% and trade at a P/E of 30-40. This means that when the market looks at the present value of the future cash flows of these two types of entities they strongly favor the latter.

Great, but how does one become a billionaire. Whereas for a traditional publisher £100 spent on advertising might turn into £80 worth of market capitalization, for an online publisher £100 spent on advertising can turn into £1600. For the UK, this means that the £720 million spent on online recruitment advertising creates nearly £10 billion in wealth and, by 2012, it will create over £20 billion in market value (or about 30 times the value of Trinity Mirror - Britain’s biggest newspaper group). The only question is how many billionaires (1-20) will it create in the process.

Update: TechCrunch on Ballmer on Print

Business Week is putting together an upcoming piece on the twitter CV and put out a request on one of their house blogs, blogspotting for ideas on what a twitter CV might look like. I tried my hand at a couple

For me: Current: http://tinyurl.com/5rcnmb Past: http://tinyurl.com/5khjbs Bio: http://tinyurl.com/6hn9kp Contact: @wmfischer
For Al Gore: Harvard, ‘Nam, Congress, VP (elected CinC ), Apple Board. Oscar, Nobel & Emmy winner. Saved planet. Oh, & invented the Internet, natch

But I must tip my hat to @ZachGonzales who put forth:

For Salvador Dali: Lobster.

Louise Triance of the UK Recruiter Blog wrote a really excellent introduction to twitter and its relevancy to recruitment in this post. For us, RSS never really took off. We offer it to our users, in part since it was simple for us to do, but there’s not much interest. It could be that our implementation was poor but my hunch, is that it just wouldn’t be that popular anyway. We have started to offer Twitter Feeds and I’m curious what the pick up might be. If it becomes popular we will build better Twitter tools, if not we might just punt.

Broadcasting Online Recruitment News BORN, has an interesting post speculating that newspapers can win the battle for recruitment advertising if content remains “king.”  To back up the post, there are some charts for the Guardian, the Telegraph, and the Times that show, after seasonal variation is removed, modest growth in their number of online ads.

Newspapers have traditionally benefited from their ability to provide targeted, timely, advertising to a broad audience at a modest price.  This allowed for their dominance in the classified advertising space.  Content was the product that built their audience.  And so, newspapers were able to be the intermediary between companies and their potential pool of labor.  This proved to be a very lucrative spot in the value chain.

But there was nothing inherent in the content piece that allowed newspapers to occupy this position.  Sure they may have put in some filler articles (10 tips to a great CV), but it was the targeted reach/£ that attracted the advertisers.  With measurable media buys online, this dynamic accelerates.   Professional reporting might prove to be a cheap source or traffic, but it’s got an awful lot of competition.  Job boards are currently in a race to the bottom on pricing, this will impact classified advertising margins, and niche sites can offer a level of targeting well beyond top level newspaper categories.

If content is defined as first-level professional reporting, and king is defined as the ability to generate the largest audience most efficiently, then the BORN assertion that Newspapers can win is plausible but far from a given.

Unfortunately, that’s a very narrow way to look at content, and professional journalism is going to have a heck of a time competing efficiently for attention on the net.

Our vision is the following:  the number of intermediaries will increase dramatically.  margins for intermediaries get squeezed.  There will be a push to the edge (back to the advertisers sites) and tens of thousands of new sites and hundreds of new platforms providing classified advertising.  Our job at workhound is to make navigating this new environment easy for our users.

Wm

A podcast, I really enjoy is econtalk. This week the interview was with Robin Hanson, an economics professor, who was being questioned on his notion of the importance of understanding signaling - “the ways people spend resources to convey information about ourselves to others.” Although I think his premise has some falsifiability issues (signaling = signaling, not signaling =signaling), at the core he touches upon one of the key drivers or human behavior.

Yesterday, Fred Wilson, a thesis driven VC, with some current plays in the social media space, when asked about a putting forward a “grand vision” of social media put forward “every single human being posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet.” Instead of looking at the utility of the behavior, it suggests that self expression alone is a sufficient reason for individuals to spend “attention” “money” or “labor.”

This concurs with some consumer research on DVD purchasing behavior I did for another company. One of the surprising learnings was that individuals often bought them as a proxy for self-expression i.e. by having a physical copy of the DVD on the shelf, they could communicate to others the type of person they were by their revealed preferences.

Myspace, to my mind, was largely a forum for self-expression that, as the network expanded, developed more utility as a communication medium.

In consumer products, brand preferences, are also proxies for self-expression - politics, aesthetics, socio-economic status can all be revealed by a simple tendency to favor one brand over another. Self-expression is a very powerful driver and I think, to overstate the power of this form of signaling.

We believe that job search and other web activities will more and more be built upon some of the emerging social media platforms. Whether one is an potential employee or employer, it’s important to remember that your presence in these arenas will be loaded with signifiers that will be read and interpreted.

Wm

Techcrunch has further thoughts on this

Tim O’Reilly has an interesting blog post in response to Michael Arrington’s post on search.  He suggests that the approach of making modest improvements upon Google SERPs is akin to windmill tilting since the emerging platforms being build on the web will negate the old models of navigation.  We’re inclined to agree that it’s imperative for organizers of data to constantly be evaluating their distribution models and presentation layer for relevancy in new modes of engaging with the web.  We are constantly building and testing new approaches.  That being said, we also believe that the existing Google model has plenty of life left in it and that billions can still be made in even modest improvements to existing models.

O’Reilly, also puts forth a the compelling notion that,  “True search innovation will come from something that doesn’t look like search.” This is an area that we wholeheartedly agree.  Our most prominent iteration of our site, is based upon peer approaches that are basically Google SERPS + filters.  Our challenge, and we’re working internally and with folks from the University of Michigan, Human Interaction Program, is to build a job search engine that doesn’t feel like a search engine.  Kayak.com, is a vertical search engine in the travel space, but it feels like a regular travel booking site.  Match.com is a vertical search engine in the prospective mate space, but it feels like a regular dating site.

Both of these products, exercise a curatorial role like Jason Calacanis’ mahalo, they are intention based which give them semantic qualities, and they provide preference filtering tools.  But there are other aspects to them which we are seeking to build into our platform so that a visit to our job search engine doesn’t feel like a visit to a job search engine.

Since these qualities are not necessarily manifest, we’d love any ideas on how to identify and incorporate them into what we are building.

Wm