I built a website to help job hunters.

eoin.h

Hi folks!

I've been working on a small website designed to help people who are looking for a job.

The site lets you create 'saved searches' that it will then use to continuously search all the major job listing sites, notifying you when it finds new listings that match your criteria. For those familiar with Google Alerts, it's similar, just a bit more focused.

You can find it here: http://gatorapp.com

I built this to scratch an itch and maybe help a few people out. It's still a little rough around the edges but I'd love to get your feedback.

Thanks,
Eoin

term

Hi

Great idea, well done on getting it up and going.

Couple of things that I found whilst briefly using it:

Once you hit view on a job listing, you can't go back to the listing but must hit preview again. Not a huge issue, just would prefer not to have to start again.

Can you include a "relevance to search" indicator like a per cent score, or an option to search the whole text or just the job description. I put in some general terms like "senior retail manager" and the first result was for a HR manager in retail. Technically correct, but not what I would expect to be first.

Haven't tried the save function yet, but looks good.

HTH

eoin.h

Thanks for the feedback!

1. You're absolutely right, that's a real pain and I'll fix it.
2. Search in general needs some tweaking. I'll be adding an advanced search option that will allow you do exactly what you describe.

Cheers,
Eoin

jimoc

Sounds like a great idea but one thing that bothers me.

You say it continuously searches the job sites, how exactly does it do this.

The reason I ask is that most of the job sites, if they notice a large amount of searches coming from one IP address are very rapidly going to block that address, to prevent this sort of thing, which takes away the click-throughs from their own pages.

eoin.h

Hi jimoc,

Spidering sites continuously without getting blacklisted is tricky. Gator behaves very much like any search-engine spider in that it employs adaptive rate limiting based on server responses to avoid getting banned. I've hit site request-rate limits a few times, but have never been black-listed.

Thanks!
Eoin

finisklin

Have you looked at simplyhired.ie? It's a sister site of linkedin and they do this effectively....might be of interest to you....

KarlDrake

Top man Eoin.

Where's the money:)

I do like it tho, have saved some searches so time will tell!!!

Best of luck with it!

AARRRGH

eoin.h wrote: »

Hi jimoc,

Spidering sites continuously without getting blacklisted is tricky. Gator behaves very much like any search-engine spider in that it employs adaptive rate limiting based on server responses to avoid getting banned. I've hit site request-rate limits a few times, but have never been black-listed.

Thanks!
Eoin

As someone who has many years experience spidering job websites, you will definitely get banned if you are hitting their servers more than once every couple of hours. You have to respect their property.

Good luck with the site.

cronos

Any chance you could remove recruitment agency job add's and only include ones directly from employers.

eoin.h

Thanks for all the feedback and signups folks, much appreciated.

@cronos, I'll definitely take a look at making filtering out agency jobs an option. Great idea, thanks.

@AARRGH, It looks like you do have *a lot* of experience in this area Thanks for the info.

@finisklin I'd seen SimplyHired.com, but didn't realize there was an Irish version, thanks.

Eoin