VentureBeat

ranjit padmanabhan said:

One quick comment - in your article, you note “Job scraping is fairly new”. Not quite. One of the first job-scrapers was the legendary ‘Junglee’ (founded 1996), which was eventually bought by Amazon. A company called ‘Careercast’ made a reasonable business of this in the late 90’s, and since that time, this particular wheel has been regularly re-invented with incremental innovations in smarter crawlers and better search engines.

Dave McClure said:

Hey Matt -

Thanks for including Simply Hired in your article on Yahoo’s vertical search announcement. Certainly appears the space is getting interesting, eh?

One comment: in the article section titled “start-ups follow suit” where we’re mentioned, to be accurate Yahoo followed *our* lead, rather than the other way around. Similarly, the Jobster-Workzoo acquisition announced today is chasing the tail of the LinkedIn partnership we announced back in April (which you also reported on: http://www.siliconbeat.com/entries/2005/04/26/job_hunting_try_using_your_connections_online.html). We were the first company to integrate vertical search with social networking, and also first to integrate Netflix-style ratings for job search.

But beyond the follow-the-leader features race, the next set of milestones we’re working on go a lot further than just great search technology. Over the next few months as we drive towards our production launch, the features we’re delivering focus on apps & content that create a great overall jobseeker experience, not just a great search experience.

And as vertical search matures further, this is where we think differentiation will be established — the companies that *combine* & integrate structured search with great apps & great content will be dramatically more successful than just those that live by search alone.

For more thoughts on this topic, checkout info from the Vertical Leap search engine conference we hosted last month:
http://blog.simplyhired.com/archives/2005/06/vertical_leap_t.php
and our Top 10 Rules for Vertical Revolutionaries:
http://blog.simplyhired.com/archives/ppt/top10.ppt

regards, & congrats on the WSJ article ;)

- Dave McClure
http://www.SimplyHired.com

Matt Marshall said:

Thanks Dave. We love our editors, and they are more often right than wrong. They spruce up our stories, and correct all kinds of errors. But sometimes they get things wrong. They threw in that section heading, without running it by us. Sigh.

Joel Cheesman said:

Nice article, Matt, but for the record, it’s JOEL Cheesman, not John.

Matt Marshall said:

Corrected! Sorry about that, Joel.

pwb said:

Doesn’t seem much different from the search engines scraping any ole site. And now companies are being educated that they do not need to pay for HotJob listings.

Paul Forster said:

On the topic of corrections:

Indeed beta-launch: November 30, 2004
Simplyhired beta-launch: March 16, 2005
Yahoo/Hotjobs new job search engine launch: July 12, 2005

Paul Forster
http://www.indeed.com - one search. all jobs.

David McClure said:

well, if we’re recording the history of job search aggregation, maybe a few more:
* Flipdog founded: January 2000 (maybe earlier)
* Flipdog acquired by Monster: June 2001

and also:
* Flipdog founder becomes SimplyHired advisor: fall 2004

(agreed you guys were first *recently* Paul, but FlipDog was before all of us. perhaps other precursors as well, according to Marc Cenedalla)

Mike Hogan said:

This has ramifications beyond employment sites, it accelerates the process of cannibalizing newspaper classified ads (a $16.6B market) that Craigslist, eBay and others have started. Read more at my blog on the topic: http://thinklocal.blogspot.com/2005/07/yahoo-accelerates-classified-ad.html

Ray said:

Since this is my first with a blog, who can give me the real beat about Jobster, now? Are they any better than Linkedin or others when you are the job seeker?

serious said:

http://search.jobsteve.com/sltcojdnc/ mattordealskirt