Job Search Engine JobisJob “Dear Charles” letter

April 25th, 2008 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Updates | 1 Comment »

Dear Charles,

We have been very busy and there are so many news at JobisJob that I hardly know where to start.

After some improvements in our look and feel, JobisJob not only has a fresher look, but it is also easier to use. Usability tests of our website have given us new impulses on how to better structure all the information we offer.

The second big news is that our German version JobisJob.de has been launched. The results exceed all our expectations and growing user numbers show that we have done our job properly. JobisJob.de, of course, has all the features known from JobisJob.co.uk, but thinking of the needs and interests of job seekers we have added a new powerful search option that really sets us apart: Together with job offers, our German users now also have the option of searching courses and trainings related to their professional area.

Taking into account the competitiveness of the German job market, and the fact that additional training is a substantial asset on your CV, combining job offers and training opportunities has been a natural next step for us. As you were so kind to spread out the news about JobisJob before, we wonder if you would like to post information on the recent developments in JobisJob….

Yvonne

SomethingSimpler this way comes!

April 25th, 2008 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in News | No Comments »

SomethingSimpler, a leading developer of vertical search and content matching technologies, is pleased to announce a partnership with ShowTimeTickets.com.

Something Simpler is leveraging both its Pulse recommendation service and Relevator recommendation engine to provide ShowTimeTickets.com with the ability to better connect with customers by recommending relevant tickets for sports, concert, and theatre events within the sites and services they already frequent.

This partnership will provide accurate recommendations to internet users by leveraging Something Simpler’s unique dataset of contextual information — helping them find more of what they want and less of what they don’t. By delivering personalized, relevant and timely recommendations Something Simpler will stimulate further growth in ShowTimeTickets.com’s online business via social networking sites and as a component of the ShowTimeTickets.com web site.

“We are fortunate to be working with such a forward-looking partner as ShowTimeTickets.com,” said Ian Bell, CEO of Something Simpler. “By pursuing tighter integration between their vast inventory of events and our technologies, such as the Relevator recommendation engine and Pulse, we can deliver a qualitatively better customer experience.”

In addition, Something Simpler will apply its recommendation service capabilities to vastly expand the reach and effectiveness of ShowTimeTickets.com’s online affiliate marketing program. This will allow publishers to effortlessly embed highly relevant ticket recommendations within their site’s content and benefit from the commissions driven by the higher transaction values in the secondary ticket marketplace.

Something Simpler’s first application, Pulse, demonstrates the power of social networking to present highly relevant and personalized recommendations based on user behavior and social context. Pulse allows Facebook users to stay in touch with their interests in events and entertainment while enabling the discovery of new and emerging media which are similar to the tastes of its users. A number of features will be jointly developed to integrate ShowTimeTicket.com’s unique set of purchasing tools with Pulse to allow users to jump from interest to purchase in one simple step.

Wundrbar ist wunderbar!

April 25th, 2008 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Reviews | No Comments »




Wundrbar gets asked plenty of questions.

Here are some of the more answerable ones…

Can Wundrbar _________?

Check out this list of actions to see everything that’s already hooked into Wundrbar.

With Wundrbar, you can…

Are you indexing the web?

No, we’re not building a huge index of billions of web pages. We’ll let other people handle that. We’re providing an interface so you can do the things you want online more quickly and easily than ever before.

How are you interpreting commands?

Are you doing some kind of natural language processing?

We’re not tackling natural language processing – so don’t type a complete sentence into Wundrbar and expect us to understand it! But we are processing your commands with more intelligence than any other search bar, so we can help you get what you want faster. As for how we do that – well, we don’t want to give away all our secrets, but we’re using custom implementations of well-known algorithms along with a few off-the-shelf tools. With plenty of regex in the mix, too.

Do you guys know Yubnub?

How does Wundrbar compare?

Yes, we are big fans of Yubnub – it’s an awesome tool. Wundrbar and Yubnub share the goal of making it quicker and easier to use the web, and both offer a single search box as an interface. Wundrbar has a broader scope than Yubnub and aims to be far more intuitive.

Yubnub is more like the traditional UNIX command line, which is powerful but not intuitive, because it requires a very particular syntax and / or flagged parameters. With Wundrbar, you can perform an action by using a wide range of shortcuts and keywords, and the parameters are automagically figured out. For example, try out a flight search with Wundrbar – all the parameters are grabbed as you enter your search. In addition, Wundrbar manages your logins, so that you can use Wundrbar to manage your personal accounts from any computer, from email, or even by text message (those features coming soon!).

So Wundrbar is basically a command line for the web?

Yes and no. We at Wundrbar have a lot of respect for the command line interface – it’s fast and powerful. However, it’s not intuitive. Unless you use some command every week, then you have to dig through the man page to figure out how to use it again, you know? And that’s not convenient. So we’ve built Wundrbar to get past that problem – so you don’t have to remember particular keywords, or the order of parameters, or the parameter flags. Can you imagine a UNIX flight search command? It might look like ‘flightsearch -from sfo -to nyc -leave 6/1/08 -return 6/8/08′. With Wundrbar, that becomes ‘fly sfo nyc june 6 to june 8′ – or many variations thereof!

Does Wundrbar come in any other flavors?

Sure thing. Head on over to our extras page for the Firefox search plugin and toolbar. Soon we’ll have an iPhone app, a Facebook app, maybe a 12-can fridge-pack… well, we’ll start with the apps.

Wait, I don’t get it.

If I can use Wundrbar as a shortcut for everything else, why would I ever need another search engine?

You do get it!

Now, take a look at their excellent demo video!