Workhound Job Search Engine Blog

Google Flu Trends offers a fascinating look at how search engines can replace traditional models for data acquisition to great effect.  When google took search requests of flu symptoms by region and mapped them to CDC data, they indicated that at much greater speed and lower cost they could collect epidemiological info the closely correlates [...]

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Low cost providers do well in market downturns.  McDonalds and  Wal-Mart both posted topline growth in October.  This demonstrates that the right market positioning (”Dollar Menus” and “Every day low prices”) can permit a company to make share of wallet gains in very competitive markets.  In this environment, Value is the key USP.  For recruitment [...]

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There seems to be a broad macroeconomic consensus, that the deleveraging of carry trades, the tightening in credit markets, and the revaluing of broad basket of assets, will depress economic growth for the next several quarters. This speculation seems to be on solid footing and individuals/orgs like Fred Wilson, Jason Calacanis, and Sequoia have offered [...]

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Jason Calacanis is the CEO of Mahalo, a human powered search engine, and an industry veteran who is a true entrepreneur’s entrepreneur.  In his most recent newsletter - The Startup Depression, he looks at the larger macro-economic climate and suggests that for start-ups this will likely be a trying period and he puts forward some [...]

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We’re delighted to announce that we’ve closed our Series A round of funding with a terrific media partner. This will allow us to invest more in the development of our job search engine, salary calculator, advertising platform, mobile and other job search services.  More details and a link to the release here in the media [...]

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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 [...]

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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

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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. [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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