• by Shankar Gupta , March 29, 2005

Meta search engines for job listings are popping up everywhere these days, with at least three sites recently coming to market: Oodle.com, Indeed.com, and Simplyhired.com.

Oodle.com--which aggregates all classified ads, not just job ads, from sites like Craigslist.com, CareerBuilder.com, eBay.com, and newspapers, with searches serving Chicago, Dallas, and Philadelphia--launched in beta on Monday.

Another site, Simplyhired.com, launched in beta on March 16 with an index of 2.6 million jobs.

And a third site, Indeed.com, which debuted in November, came out of beta on Monday.

But some observers question whether these sites comply with copyright laws. "It's a very interesting model, to aggregate all of the listings in one spot," said Peter Zollman, the executive editor of Classified Intelligence LLC. "I'm very impressed with several of these, but the issue becomes: Are they going to make a living, and will a company that has invested a great deal of money in capturing or selling the listings allow a company to recapture and republish them?"

Job meta search sites crawl and index online job boards--like Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com--classifieds, and company career pages to put together a comprehensive search of as many job openings as possible listed on the Web. Their interface resembles that of a local search engine, with a field for what kind of position you're looking for, and where you're looking for it.

Paul Forster--who co-founded Indeed.com, a job search site that came out of beta on Monday--said that his company had sought legal advice, and that the company was confident that the law was on their side. "We don't foresee any issues," he said. Forster's site, Indeed.com, is possibly the largest job search site, crawling roughly 100,000 new jobs every day. For its official launch, the site tweaked the search algorithm and began to crawl and index individual companies' job sites. The site has indexed over 100 companies' career pages at this point, Forster said.

Indeed.com will be monetized via paid search listings, said Forster. He added that the company will sell sponsored links, to be displayed in a box above and on the right margin, next to the organic search results. But the company has not yet begun selling ads, and Forster declined to comment on when the ad space would be put on the market.