A Quick Comparison of Google and Indeed.com Trends
Posted by Ariel Seidman | February 3, 2007Steve Rubel has a good post on the use of basic (yet powerful) analytic tools such as Google Trends and Indeed to develop insight into whether or not certain technologies are hype or here to stay. While there is no doubt that these tools are powerful I have some concerns with the use of the Indeed data for a few reasons:
- Unlike Google Trends or Flickr Camera Finder which rely on data that is directly provided by users on their respective sites the data on which Indeed trends is based on is based on their crawled data and therefore very suspect (full disclosure I did work in the Yahoo!’s HotJobs group). Lets go one level deeper and look at the Indeed corpus and why it is not suitable for analytics and trending:
- Hiring managers and recruiters flood their job descriptions with buzzwords in order to rank higher on Careerbuilder, Monster, HotJobs, etc. hence generating hiring trends based on the occurrence of certain keywords in a job description won’t tell you that much and for certain keywords will likely lead you in the wrong direction.
- Aggregating job listings via a crawl (which is what Indeed does) is not easy and it yields tens of duplicates per job (every recruiter posts their jobs to multiple sites).
By the way Indeed is a pretty good job search engine, this trends feature is a bit out of place. It would be far more interesting if they provided trends on what their users were searching for.
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Mr.Seidman,
I enjoy the same topics you do and find your blog insightful.
What is your take on Jobster taking on Monster?
Comment by Aces13 — February 9, 2007 #