Since this blog began on June 1, 2007, we have published almost 3,500 posts exclusively about alternative search engines. Our conferences were composed entirely of these same search engines, and when I reached out for recommendations on LinkedIn, most of the responses were from, you guessed it, alternative search engines.

Well, this begs the question, are they hiring?

Let’s take a look at a small sample:

About half of the search engines that we’ve covered have a “jobs” link on the home or About Us page.

Let’s take a look at some of them.

*Jobs at Pixsy*

Pixsy Corporation is a next-generation media search platform that enables any website or application to run a branded photo or video search engine. We’re a startup that was named “Hottest Company” at a recent venture capital event in Silicon Valley. Even though we’re a small company, our business is growing rapidly and we’re looking for extremely talented, highly motivated enthusiastic people to contribute to our growth. This is a chance to make a serious impact. San Francisco, CA. Send cover letter and resume to jobs@pixsy.com.

*We are hiring!*

We are now assembling our team for our new office in London. And this is the chance to realize your coding passion. Do you love to challenge the limits? We are looking for an excellent programmer (Windows, .NET, C#, Ajax), who lives in the Web 2.0 world, and is ready to dive in and debug complex p2p algorithms. Additional knowledge in search engine architecture and experience with build tools, version management and unit tests will make you our shooting star. If you want to change the world of search together with a small, open minded team, please get in touch with us and send your resume.

*Work at Snooth*

Snooth is revolutionizing the way people buy wine. We’re the world’s largest and fastest growing wine marketplace. We’re a nimble, New York based, venture capital backed company and a great place for smart, hard working people to make a difference and help us change the wine industry.
Competitive Salaries, Full Benefits. All positions come with a comprehensive benefits package, belying our startup status: health, dental, vision, vacation, stock options, meals, travel reimbursement etc. Work With Interesting People.

Snooth is a small startup with less than 10 employees, but we’re a unique group of people with a wide range of previous experience. Between us we’ve done things from climbing Everest to DNA sequencing, as well as created and built popular products for such companies as Lucent, Vivastreet, Merrill Lynch, Sony Ericsson and many others. Snooth’s employees have over 30 years of combined experience in the wine industry. If you see a job you’re interested in, send us an email telling us about yourself and your relevant experience to jobs@snooth.com.

If you refer someone to us and we end up hiring them (and they are still with us after 3 months), we’ll send you a check for $2,000 as a thank you.

Current Positions

All positions are full time and based in New York or San Francisco.

* Engineering Intern Duties Include:
* Build tools (largely in PHP and Perl) to help the team work more efficiently.
* Help to test code before it is released on the production environment.
* Work with a large data set — improve quality of the data as the quantity scales.
* Work with the team to uncover and resolve potential issues.

Marketing Intern Duties Include:
* Contacting prospective business partners.
* Customer service.
* Search engine marketing and web analytics.
* Administrative duties as needed.

For career opportunities:
careers@thefind.com

*Jobs at Surf Canyon*

Position: Director of Marketing

Job Description / Responsibilities:

* Develop ads, landing pages, emails and other collaterals that effectively communicate the benefits of our product to multiple audiences
* Create awareness and a positive image of Surf Canyon among its target audiences through social media and traditional public relations
* Develop direct response campaigns, plan them, implement them and measure results

Qualifications:

* 5+ years experience in the creative direction of web design, collateral design, advertising, and other marketing campaigns
* 5+ years experience with web design and web marketing
* Finely tuned intuition for recognizing whether a web page, email or other marketing material effectively communicates the key message to its audience
* Thorough understanding of social media and techniques for utilizing this channel to promote knowledge of product and company
* Familiarity and experience with software and or the computer industry
* ROI responsibility for marketing campaigns with a proven track record of success
* Expert project management skills with the proven ability to juggle multiple projects

The company is headquartered in Oakland, CA.

Thoughts:

While virtual offices are a cool concept, they don’t seem to be a very common.

These jobs are tied to California, New York, or London, etc.

Blogging about search engines is one thing.  Blogging for a search engine is another.

Marketing certainly seems a closer match than programming, though.

After covering search engines and job search engines, I know of no resource that would allow someone to search just the hundreds of search startups that we have covered, so checking each one might be the only way to go!