Search - Track online conversations with Omgili - Part 1

This is a series covering niche search resources which job seekers can use. Today we start with a search engine called Omgili which is regularly covered at AltSearchEngines.

Introduction

Web 2.0 is all about blogs, microblogs, social media sites, social networking sites, etc. Important as these are, there is also a huge amount of information in older formats such as forums, discussion groups, shopping comparison sites and more. These Web 1.0 resources is not as well structured nor are they easily searchable.

Omgili is a niche search engine that focusses on these information resources and covers an important segment of the web. The about us page says it best

• 'Omgili is a specialized search engine that focuses on "many to many" user generated content platforms, such as, Forums, Discussion groups, Mailing lists, answer boards and others.'
• 'Omgili is a crawler based, vertical search engine that scans millions of online discussions worldwide in over 100,000 boards, forums and other discussion based resources.'

The Omgili menu

The menu shown at the top consists of the following options

1. Discussions Search - Search discussions containing search terms entered in the search box.
2. Reviews - Search reviews for specific products entered in the search box.
3. Stream - See updates on discussions as they are discovered like a Twitter search stream.
4. Buzzzz - See the top discussions happening under categories such as videos, news, topics, movies and products.
5. Google@Omgili - Get enhanced Google search results with the result urls linked to discussions mentioning those urls.
6. Q&A - See questions asked in discussions containing the search terms mentioned.
7. Health - Omgili pulls health topics from www.imedix.com using the search terms entered.
8. Directory - The various discussion forums are categorized with categories available as RSS Feeds to receive updates.
   
9. Categories - This menu gives a popup for quick selection of a particular category.

We will start by looking at the first of the menu options Omgili forum search a.k.a. Discussions Search in our next post using a job search example.

The 10 best job search groups on Linkedin

Tim Tyrell-Smith has a post on Secrets of the Job Hunt blog. He identifies the 10 best job search groups on Linkedin.

Linkedin allows a Jobs tab in groups, so that is a great resource once the relevant group as per ones need is selected

Using social sites in your job search

Dan Schwabel of Mashable gives a list of 10 social sites for job seekers to use in their job search.

JS-Kit commenting system

Just added the JS-Kit commenting system to blogger. This is a test post to see how it works. Many thanks to commentor Raman found after this post at the Man of Many Words blog who has another interesting workaround.

Mussie's Design Manifesto

While looking up a site using Google Connect Social bar on this Google Webmaster Central post I came across an interesting Design Manifesto

Job Aggregators for Job Seekers

Job Aggregators

Job aggregators provide job seekers with jobs collected from various sites at a single location. The target sites include job boards, company career pages and agency sites. They work somewhat similarly to the larger search engines like Google, Yahoo, Live but are focussed on indexing jobs.

Some of the major aggregators covering jobs in India are listed below

Indeed
Simplyhired
Bixee
Recruit.net

Job aggregators also provide facility to create accounts, receive alerts by email or subscribe to RSS feeds. Some provide additional information including Salary trends as well as demand for the positions.

In our next article we will focus each of the individual aggregators mentioned above. This will cover features, sources covered, job volumes for some sample positions and for various locations.

Twitter, Linkedin, Monster

Numbers from Compete for Jan 2009

Twitter - touching 6 million people/month - 812% growth over one year
Linkedin - over 11 million people/month - 146% growth over one year
Monster - over 33.5 million people/month - 58% growth over one year

Looks good for these 3 so far. A lot of aggregators going at Monster, not sure if the numbers exclude these.