Adding Intelligence To Search

Clearly Google’s been doing that for years. Their search just keeps getting better and better. But innovation in search is not limited to Google. Our portfolio company, Indeed, which operates the most popular search engine for jobs launched a new feature this week that showcases how searching can become more intelligent.

When people search for jobs, they want to put in a salary floor. They don’t want to see jobs that don’t at least pay a certain amount. Problem is most job listings on the Internet don’t include salaries.

What Indeed did was built a system that estimates salaries on all jobs. Here’s how they do that:

How do we estimate salaries? We use a proprietary methodology based on
an analysis of similar job listings that include salaries. We start by
extracting salaries from all job listings containing this information –
about a fifth of the total – and then estimate salaries for the rest.

So now for the first time, you can do a search for jobs across the entire web (or certainly as close to the entire web as anyone offers) and get only those jobs that meet your salary requirements.

Here’s a search for a CFO jobs in NYC that pay more than $200k per year. I love when companies make the web smarter than it really is.

#VC & Technology

Comments (Archived):

  1. James

    I love this!

  2. Joshua Reich

    When something is working in the background like this, it should a) let the user know that it is just guessing, and b) give a sense of the error margin. When Zillow prices a house at $1.5m, but with a range of $600k to $2.2m, I know exactly how much salt to take with their estimate. Confidence intervals are not evil or confusing.There is no way that the job returned for my search of “dance $200,000” actually pays anywhere near this.

    1. Devin Dawson

      Good point on the disclosure. Still, if the day ever comes that Indeed will have the data and search share to sell hiring managers on the need to stop playing information hiding games, that end may be worth the fuzziness.

  3. BillSeitz

    What’s really awesome about this is that it might nudge companies toward actually posting *real* ranges as corrections to the Indeed estimate.

  4. stone

    This makes me think of Zillow, too, but in a bad way. Their Zestimates are often so far off that I quickly got turned off never to return again. If the same happens with Indeed their initial flurry of users will melt away. On the other hand if the guesses are good they have just added value in a big way.

  5. Kendal H

    I didnt know this site exists. WOW! They should REALLY market this to college students more.

    1. rossgreenspan

      Agree. I’m about to graduate and this site is manna. Never ever heard of it until now.

  6. dave

    Shame it doesn’t seem to have UK jobs… Payscale.com is a useful site for working out what salary to expect for various jobs…

  7. charlie crystle

    I’d like to see search added to intelligence

  8. Andy Freeman

    There’s another biz here, analyzing ads for employers.Trivial example – you can tell an employer that their ad looks like an ad for a $120k/year person. If you can tell them why, better still. (For the purposes of this analysis, you ignore any stated salary range.)

  9. Guest

    .First of all like your engine….BUT REALLY “search getting better and better”?Search is not getting better but more dynamic with others Paid 4 Placement from the Bill Gross Overture/Google shake out. Since then well personally think the signal to noise ratio has grown not closed Chris

  10. jackson

    You can’t make anything smarter than it really is. You may be able to make it seem smarter than it really is, or you can indeed make it smarter, but things are what they are.

  11. SEO

    As nowadays unemployment rate is very high so people always want to see the jobs with the salary package they are offering just to make sure that are not wasting their time on unimportant things.. The above mentioned method for calculating salaries is very nice.. Obviously innovations can’t be dependent on Google or anything so this method will definitely gonna work..

  12. lee

    may I suggest some form of additional “guide salary” user input – if anyone has any private information either because they interviewed for the position or are employed in a similar role elsewhere, they can add it to your “estimate” dataset.great site, by the wayL