Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion

Niche blog search engines Technorati and Feedster have some new competition. Maybe you’ve heard of them: Google.

Checkout http://www.google.com/blogsearch and search.blogger.com (same search, different interfaces).

Yes, for the blogosphere, this is pretty big news. For those of you who are junkies like me, this topic will be beaten to death over the next few days. I’ll spare you my commentary on how this will kill the blog search engines.

What I will comment on is the crystal ball this offering seems to be for providing vertical search for other content. Say, oh, jobs for example.

Do a search and you’ll see how the results are served. You’ll notice results take you to actual blog entries and not homepages of blogs – just like they might take you directly to job listings. You’ll notice results are incredibly timely.

You’ll notice that results are ranked by relevancy. This is a big difference from most of the other blog search engines
like Technorati, which default to a date-based sort.

This kind of  ranking should be the secret weapon to Google’s
blog search success. From
limited testing, it appears to be a combination of
timing, links, and keyword frequency.

And if you think of this in terms of job postings, the relevancy issue becomes very important. Here’s an example: Do a search for online recruiting.

You’ll notice that this very blog owns a lot of real estate on page one. Am I the only one blogging about online recruitment? Of course not. But you may not know that looking at the results.

Could an employer leverage the same optimization tactics in a vertical search for jobs and push their competition down the ladder of results? You bet they can. And I think savvy employers will do just that.

You’ll also notice the ability to get results via your favorite RSS feeder. Say goodbye to e-mail alerts.

For Monster, CareerBuilder, SimplyHired, Indeed, your local newspaper, etc., Google’s move shouldn’t be a surprise, but it should certainly be a wake-up call to what their futures may hold. The 800-pound gorilla may soon be coming to their neighborhood too.

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