TwitterJobSearch goes where Google doesn't!

AUSTIN, USA & LONDON, UK: Rounding off the buzz at this year’s SXSWi is the launch of TwitterJobSearch, the first ‘smart’ search engine that extracts meaning from Twitter content to create a real-time, global online resource of all jobs posted onto the platform.

Using relevancy algorithms developed by Workhound, the UK's largest job search engine, the technology will build out into further social media channels and topics, providing semantic intelligence capabilities for social media platforms, business and consumers.

“ TwitterJobSearch is an early example of how social media search needs to evolve and signals how solid business models can be built ;” commented Howard Lee, CEO of Workhound. "The pronounced shift into social media and cloud computing is already changing the Internet landscape and evolving consumers’ expectations. Search and social network providers are in real danger of losing their relevance and traction unless they can get this right.”

Twitter now attracts more visitors than Digg.com, with traffic increasing over 974 percent through 2008 (Hitwise) suggesting it will soon become a mainstream, mass market proposition. According to the GigaTweet counter, there have been over 1.3 billion tweets posted on Twitter, yet this wealth of raw data has previously only been searchable via keywords, trends or popularity. Hashtags are useful for the categorisation and searching of subjects but there is no way of controlling the number of tags created or used per topic, while popular tags such as #jobs have quickly turned into

catch-alls for anything vaguely ‘job’ related.

“If the value of Twitter is going to extend beyond one's social graph, better search tools are required;" added William Fischer, Director of Workhound. “By applying contextual search to billions of really quite random tweets, we're helping social networks to evolve from communication tools to become powerful publishing platforms."

TwitterJobSearch looks at the content of every tweet in context to determine its intent and break out filterable data.  Getting beyond the 140 character limit of Twitter by going beyond the tweet, the technology also looks at biography information and crawls the destination URLs to find additional information and context.

The real-time relevancy engine and algorithms determine everything from whether the source of the post was a feed, retweet or original message, what language was used, whether the tweeter has previously posted job vacancies and how the words used categorise the content.  Additional context is added wherever possible to ensure the tweet appears in search results if it is missing vital data such as location.

A couple of example searches show the difference in results attainable if contextual search is incorporated. “Sales director London job” on search.twitter.com brings back four results, while the same search on TwitterJobSearch provides 6,202 opportunities, while “Marketing manager New York job” provides 19 and 4,122 respectively.

Due to the myriad terms used for recruitment, this level of functionality adds value to both job seekers and employers by ensuring that all relevant opportunities can be seen and responded to.

This initial launch means that anyone online can now access the wealth of job opportunities posted onto Twitter, regardless of whether they are a member. There were 26,090 unique English language vacancies posted onto Twitter over the last seven-day period, which equates to around 3 percent of live vacancies.

Due to the immediacy and ease of use of the platform, Twitter is often used as the primary communications channel, meaning that vacancies posted can be found and applied for before they even reach blogs, job boards or other online resources. In light of the increasingly alarming global unemployment figures, which could rise from 179 million in 2007 to 230 million by the end of 2009 (International Labour Organisation), any tool that supports re-employment and recruitment will become of greater importance as the recession bites harder.

TwitterJobSearch requires no registration, is free to use and automatically incorporates all unique vacancies posted onto Twitter at no charge. A range of low cost, premium positioning features will be added in the future to provide an opportunity for recruiters and employers to ensure extra exposure on the service.

Based on Workhound’s search technology, the suite of recruitment services will evolve to incorporate iPhone-specific applications and further highly-trafficked networks such as Facebook and FriendFeed.  The company is also using its core infrastructure to create intelligent semantic services in a number of other popular search categories which will be brought to market over the course of the year.