Job Search Engine FlipDog Gears Up

Yesterday's Washington Post had a story about upcoming job search engine FlipDog (read the story at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-03/09/260l-030900-idx.html .) You can see the FlipDog beta at http://www.flipdog.com/ . FlipDog looks like it's acting as a specialty search engine, scraping employer's sites for job postings and making them available in a massive database. At the moment it looks like they've got over 200,000 listings in their database right now. The big thing about this is that FlipDog isn't charging anybody to list the jobs, like other big job sites do. That's good for them in that it's going to allow them to create a huge database. It's bad in that they might be getting some junk along with the regular stuff (though they apparently do some human review of what their scraper gathers), and unless they're verifying job listings constantly, they may end up with plenty of deadwood in their database. Employers do have the opportunity to opt out. The search engine is pretty good -- you can search by region, city, keyword, narrow down your search to certain employers, etc. Picking a city and watching the number narrow down is kind of cool. (1,239 job listings for Iowa, 34 jobs in Sioux City Area, Iowa, 7 engineering jobs in Sioux City Area, Iowa, etc.)

This looks to me like a perfect opportunity to use the RSS syndication model. Charge participating companies some skinny amount of money -- like $50 a year or something -- and have a bot scrape their job listings RSS every day. And I don't know too much about the technology, but couldn't you do some kind of server-side deal where you implemented keyword filtering on the RSS headlines you display? Couldn't you turn all those scraped job notice headlines into some really nice keyword-based job feeds? Still, anyway, it's worth a look.

Posted to Business-Jobs-Search