Blog of Monica Valentinelli, Writer & Content Consultant

Posted on August 26, 2008 - by Monica Valentinelli

Job hunting? Here’s a Search Engine you Can’t Live Without

Monster. HotJobs. Your local paper. Company websites. If you’re looking for a job, conventional wisdom almost always says that looking for work is a job in itself. With so many places to hunt for listings, job hunting isn’t always a quick-and-easy thing to do — especially if you start adding multiple websites to your list.

Enter http://www.indeed.com, a specialty search engine that pulls jobs from multiple websites. Also known as a “vertical search engine,” this type of search engine offers job hunters precious time by pulling in results from all over the web. Earlier, I had mentioned how important it was to use keywords to sell your articles. Here, hunting for jobs is no different.

After a few weeks of trial-and-error, you’ll want to make sure you have a list of different combinations of keywords available for the job you’re looking for. Because some listings may appear on multiple sites, I generally only went about three-to-five search result pages deep to find what I was looking for. You can search by income level and location, but be forewarned that the results are only as good as the listings. Sometimes, the same job can appear in the low and high income stratospheres. Anecdotally, this might be the case because positions often don’t list the salary for the job so Indeed might default to offering the listing in every category.

For my fellow prolific freelancers, Indeed.com does list contract positions and freelance writing and editing opportunities in places you’d expect like http://www.problogger.com and places you certainly wouldn’t. Highly recommended, this vertical search engine is useful, focused and saves me time. If you’re interested, check out some of the links at the bottom of Indeed.com’s search engine portal; you’ll find the “trends” graphing capability to be quite interesting.