Category Archives: Interviews

The Search Lounge is very pleased to feature an exclusive interview with Mike Taylor, founder of Jobs In Search.com. Jobs In Search is located in the United Kingdom and bills itself as “The specialist job site for the Search Engine Industry”. As well as having listings for jobs at search engine companies, they also list positions from a variety of search-related companies, including those that do search engine optimization, online marketing, and web design. All features are free for job seekers, including registering. The site has been live since October, 2004 and in that short time I have seen the U.S. listings go from none to more than twenty.

Mike has a background in online recruitment, and to find out more about him check out his blog, including a more comprehensive biography.

This interview was conducted exclusively via email.

Hi Mike, thanks for joining us at the Search Lounge. It’s a pleasure to have you with us. Would you mind starting off by giving a bit of background information about how you came up with the idea of Jobs in Search?

Thanks for the invite Chris. I am pleased to take part.

My background is mainly HR and recruitment, having worked for large blue-chip companies such as IBM, Motorola and Nokia.

It was during my time at Nokia (1999 - 2001) that I first got involved with online recruitment. I ended up being responsible for Nokia UK’s online recruitment strategy and I also served on Nokia’s global Internet recruitment strategy board.

After leaving Nokia in 2001 I set up Web-Based-Recruitment, an online recruitment consultancy offering advice to companies on how to use the Internet to attract and recruit new employees.

As an extension to the online recruitment part of the business I also started Domain Attraction, an online marketing business providing search engine marketing services.

I had the idea for JobsInSearch.com in the middle of 2004 as it enabled me to draw on my background and experience of online recruitment and online marketing.

Is Jobs In Search a full-time job for you, or do you have another 9 to 5 job?

I am now working full time on Jobs In Search but I still run some search engine marketing campaigns for my existing clients.

How do you define the term “search industry”? And this is probably a tough follow-up question, but do you have a rough estimate as to how many people currently work in this industry?

My personal definition (as far as Jobs In Search is concerned) is that the “search engine industry” covers all companies that are involved, or connected with, the term “search”.

This includes the Search Engines, Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing firms, New Media Agencies, firms providing search engine related software (positioning / analytics etc.) and Web Design firms.

As for how many people work in the search engine industry this was a question we asked ourselves when first starting the project. Although you can obtain figures on the number of people working with the large search engines, finding figures for the smaller search related firms proved very difficult.

Which job areas and skills do you see as being in the highest demand, both now and in the near future?

From the companies we have talked to we sense a shortage of good search engine optimization and search engine marketing professionals. As “search” continues to grow we also expect more and more companies to be recruiting for business development roles in the future.

How do you publicize your site so that people in the industry know about it? And what kind of response are you getting from hiring companies and recruiters? How about from job seekers?

We issued press releases related to the official launch which got picked up by various search engine related news and blog sites. We have also issued some further press releases since which have also been widely reported.

As you would expect we are also trying to maximize our natural search engine ranking positions as well as using pay per click. We also launched our own blog site in November 2004.

The response so far has been very encouraging as we have had a number of high profile companies contact us having seen our press releases. As for job seekers we are continuing to see the number of registrations on the site increase, which suggests that word is getting out there about the site.

I notice the majority of your jobs are for the UK, (currently more than forty jobs are listed) which is natural considering that is where you’re located. Do you have plans to expand the international listings? Has it been a challenge for you to make contacts with companies in other countries?

The plan all along was to be an international job site. You are correct in that we started with UK job listings but we expect the majority of jobs to be US based.

As for making contact with companies outside the UK it has not been a problem for us. All of the companies we have spoken to so far were happy to receive further information about our services.

Job seekers have the option of registering with you and sending in their resume and contact information. Can you explain the process and what happens after a job seeker sends in his or her resume in terms of hiring companies and recruiters seeing it?

The first step is that job seekers can register for our jobs by email service and we will send them details of any new jobs as soon as they are posted on the site that match their requirements.

In addition they can also register their resume with us and choose whether or not it can be viewed by companies and recruiters. We do not allow any companies or recruiters to view any resumes without the job seekers permission.

How does Jobs In Search work for a hiring company or a recruiter? Do they pay subscription dues? Or do they pay per job posted or per screened applicant? Or do they pay per successful hire? Or some other way?

To advertise on Jobs In Search companies or recruiters are required to purchase job credits. Each job credit lasts for 30 days from the date of posting. As there is no time limit on the use of job credits savings can be made by purchasing multiple job credits in advance.

Having researched the market for the cost of job postings we feel that we offer a very fair price for a specialist job site offering targeted job seeker traffic.

I noticed you have a jobs by email feature, but I didn’t notice an RSS feed option. Is that something you’re considering? Also, we’d love to hear about any other features and functionality improvements that you’re working on. For instance, can I assume that as you get more listings you will break down the geographical regions beyond the country level?

We are currently looking into RSS feeds and hope to add this feature in early 2005. As for other features we have more “Meet The Experts” interview profiles to add in January 2005 and beyond. We may also add an additional “training” feature in 2005 plus more information for job seekers about resume preparation etc.

As for functionality you can currently search for jobs in the major countries by state or county at the moment. However, as there is a lot of interest in “local search” we may consider more “local” options in the future.

Lastly, what’s your favorite drink?

A cup of tea!

Thanks Mike!

The Search Lounge is very pleased to feature an exclusive interview with Chris Broekhoff, Director of Content for FindArticles.com. FindArticles is a free online search engine for magazines and articles. Its database has “5.5 million articles from over 900 publications”. Google Scholar recently went live with a similar product. These valuable services are changing the way people use article databases. In the past these expensive resources have only been available through libraries or other institutions that subscribe to them. Although the end-user gets free content either way, FindArticles is breaking the barrier between proprietary databases and free online content.

This interview was conducted exclusively via email, though in true Search Lounge style it was conceived of over pints of beer.
As a disclosure, Chris and I worked together from 1999-2003 at LookSmart, FindArticle’s parent company.

Chris, thanks for joining us at the Lounge. Can you give an introduction to FindArticles?
FindArticles is a targeted search product that gives users access to over 5 million research-quality articles from a wide variety of publications. The majority of articles in the product are free to view in their full text, and many of them can’t be found anywhere else on the web for free.

What is your role?
I oversee our content acquisition and management strategy. Basically I figure out what types of content our users want and then try to acquire it from publishers and other content owners.

How long has FA been around?
FindArticles has been around for about 4 years. The product had a pretty low profile until we relaunched it in late 2003 with expanded content and new features. Since then we’ve been focusing heavily on expanding our content and delivering features our users ask for.

What types of articles are available in FindArticles? And who supplies them?
Our goal with FindArticles is to create a one-stop shop for research-quality content on the widest possible range of topics. Right now you can find everything from art criticism from a publication like Art Journal, business and finance news and analysis from journals like Business Economics and Money Digest, political reporting from Harper’s, health and fitness information from specialized medical journals and consumer health magazines, and the latest on technology trends from titles like PC Magazine and eWeek. You can see a complete list of publications in FindArticles here: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/an_1

Our biggest supplier of content is Thomson Gale, with whom we’ve had a strong relationship since we launched the product in 2000. Beyond Gale, we have a few direct relationships with publishers, and some partnerships with premium content services for our paid content.

How have users responded to FindArticles?
Users have responded very positively to the product, especially since we re-launched in late ’03 and began developing features that people had been asking us to build for a while, such as advanced searching and sorting options, and RSS feeds.

Can you tell us about the current state of searching and browsing on FindArticles? How about some useful tips and tricks for our readers?
Not surprisingly, most users who come to FindArticles enter simple keyword phrases in the search box. To these queries we return up to 2000 articles ranked according to relevance, using such things as word frequency and proximity. However, we offer a number of refinement features directly on the search results page if you don’t find what you want right away. Next to the search box you can limit your search to publications in a specific topic, and above the search results you can sort the articles by date, article length, and publication name. One of my favorite features is the ability to search within a publication or exclude it entirely from the search results. You can do this by clicking the “options” link next to each result in the list. Finally, a popular feature with users is the ability to exclude articles that you have to pay to view by clicking the “free articles only” box. And these are just the features that are available on the results page, by choosing the advanced search option, you can do more sophisticated things like search within certain database fields, exclude terms from your search, select specific publications, and limit your search to publication date ranges and article lengths. While we’ve put more emphasis on our search functionality, users can also browse topic categories and explore publications by issue.

How does your service differ from the databases available through my local public library? And as a follow-up, how do you think libraries should view services like FindArticles?
Unlike the databases you’ll find in your local library, FindArticles is developed as a consumer search product, so it’s generally more user-friendly and easier to search than the mix of databases that libraries offer. Through our experience with other search products, and our understanding of what users want and how they react to our products, we’re able to iterate on features and design in a way that continually improves FindArticles value to users. I don’t think you see that kind of focus on end users in the library databases. On the other hand, if you have the time to dig through them, libraries offer access to significantly more published content than we do, and if you have the expertise to search them, they have more advanced and complex features than FindArticles.

I think libraries should view FindArticles as complementary to what they offer their patrons. We offer casual to moderately serious researchers a convenient and comprehensive product, but we don’t really compete with the expertise that librarians can provide their customers, or the vast collection of published material, both in digital and print form, that libraries offer.

What is the business model for FindArticles? How do the database distributors make money from it?
FindArticles primary revenue is advertising, both contextual and search targeted. We share a percentage of the ad revenue with our content partners.

How many of the articles are free versus premium content that requires users to pay?
We don’t disclose exact numbers, but the majority are free to view.

What do you see as the future of free online article databases?
I’m optimistic that we’re going to see more and more published content available in free web product like FindArticles. There’s been a definite trend in usage towards web-based content, and as search-targeted and contextual advertising products continue to improve I think we’re going to see more publishers realizing that it’s in their best interest to get their content in front of as many web users as possible. At FindArticles we want to be on the forefront of this trend, but we also feel that the way to do this is to have a diverse offering of free and premium content. While we see a lot of value in a completely ad-supported model, it doesn’t necessarily work for all types of content. Our goal is to give our users access to as much content as possible, and give our content partners a variety of options to meet their goals.

Lastly, what is your favorite drink?
Vodka martini

Thanks Chris. Are there any other comments you would like to add?
Just that we are always looking for ways to improve the content and features of FindArticles, and I’d love to hear what your readers would like to see us do.

The Search Lounge is pleased to feature an exclusive interview with Blake Rhodes, CEO of Icerocket. Icerocket is a new search engine from Dallas, Texas that has the unique goal of being responsive to users. Blake maintains a useful blog about the engine To understand his philosophy, this is a good post to read: http://blog.icerocket.com/node/view/14. He writes, “When people write me with suggestions, what do I do? I LISTEN to them!! Without our users, we are nothing. As you can see, we have made several changes to the site based on the emails we have received.” True to his creed, Blake was responsive to my request for an interview.

Icerocket offers the following tabs for searching: Web, Blogs, News, Phone Pics, Images, and Find A Friend. For web results, the “archive” link takes you to results from the Wayback Machine and that’s always a good thing in my book.

For a search company that’s the equivalent of a newborn baby, I like what they’re doing and hope to see them grow.

This interview was conducted via email on December 6, 2004 by Chris Fillius.

Blake, thanks for joining us at the Search Lounge. I know your blog was started in September, but how long has Icerocket been live?
We have been live about 6 months.

Can you tell us about any features or improvements to relevancy that are being worked on right now?
Features we are working on: RSS builder, we launched this about 10 days ago, it’s a free tool and we will be adding to it. We are working on several things right now, but I can’t really talk about them.

For the web searching tab, does Icerocket pull results directly from Alexa?
We actually don’t pull Alexa’s results, just the thumbnail images and the traffic numbers. We crawl and index a lot of it ourselves.

Any plans for Icerocket to crawl and index for web search?
Nothing is out of the question. [editor’s note: an interesting teaser.]

Currently, you are using your blog in lieu of help pages for searchers. Do you plan to develop help pages or will you continue on as it is? I find the blog to be very useful, but I took the time to look around Icerocket, whereas the first place many users will look for help is in a help section.
Yes we will have help pages in all sections soon.

IceSpy provides good insight into what users are searching for on Icerocket. Do you analyze user queries? And if so, how does that influence you?
No not really, it’s kind of fun to see what others are looking for, but that’s about it.

Lastly, what’s your favorite drink?
Coke.

Thank you for your time Blake.