Site Review: TwitterJobSearch.com

There’s a new job search tool for Twitter that that is currently in Beta. As the name implies, TwitterJobSearch.com searches Twitter for relevant job postings.

The About page shares a little more information about what the site is trying to accomplish:

Until now, search engines for social media sites merely looked for words.
We’re looking at context.

We use semantic tools to look at what was said.
We then look at what they’ve said before.
We then look at who was saying it.

If we do this right, we can figure out why they’re saying anything at all.

Seems like some lofty goals. So how does it work?

Actually, pretty well.

What I liked:

1. The speed. The site is lightening fast. What is really surprising is that is it much faster than Twitter’s own search tool.
2. Relevant results. The site seems to be achieving its goal as my initial simple searches were quite accurate.
3. The ability to ReTweet messages (Critical for a site like Gradversity)

What I Disliked:

1. Semantics. Even though it sells itself as a semantic search engine, it’s not yet smart enough to fully understand context. It’s great if you enter a job title, but it’s not great if you tell it what you want to do, which is what it actually asks for  (ex. “Project Manager” vs. “I want to manage projects”). This will surely get better over time.
2. Ordering. It displays results by relevance to what you typed, not by date posted, or closing dates, or any other criteria. Sorting options would be helpful.
3. Expired links. Many of the links I tried had “expired”. While the shortened URL still existed, the backing page was gone. Not the engine’s fault, but still a user experience problem.
4. Lack of results. For the few queries I tried, there were never more than 5-10 results, though this is understandable. It’s searching Twitter, not Monster.

Who Should Use This:

1. Anyone who loves new technology and new ways to find jobs
2. Anyone who wants to put their social networking skills to work in their job search

Final Thoughts:

I like this. It has a very fresh feel to it. It’s still in Beta, so there are a number of kinks to work out, but overall I was impressed. I’m going to keep my eye on this and see what comes of it.