The official online job search resource hosted By Dick Bolles, author of "What Color is Your Parachute"
Dick's Calendar
The Internet
Research
Contacts
Counseling
Job Hunting
Jobs & Resumes
Job Hunting Online
Introduction: The Internet
1. Primer
2. Gateways
3. Supersites
4. Job Search Engines
Introduction: Research On The Internet
1. Directories
2. Search Engines
3. Best Search Engines
4. Meta-Search Tools
5. Clustering
6. Specialized Search Engines
7. General Research
8. Beyond Search Engines
9. The UnderWeb & Deep Searching
10. Beyond The Web: Usenet & Newsgroups
11. Evaluating The Data
12. Grants
Introduction: Contacts And Networking
1. Internet Networking
2. Finding People You Know
3. Finding People You Don't Know
4. Chat Rooms
5. Forums & Message Boards
6. Newsgroups
7. Mailing Lists
8. Networking Web Sites
9. A Category All Its Own
10. Miscellany
11. People At Their Business
12. E-mail
Introduction: Counseling, Testing & Advice
1. Online Job-Hunting Articles
2. Online Job-Hunting Guides
3. The Gateway Sites & More
4. Online Personality & Traits Tests
5. Online Careers Tests
6. Transferable Skills
7. Education
8. More Help: Career Counseling Offices
9. One-on-One Career Counseling
10. Offline Career Counseling
Introduction: Web Sites For Job Hunting Research
1. Geography/Moving/Where To Live
2. Identifying Careers
3. Salaries
4. Industry Research
5. Company Research
6. Company Research & Contact Info
7. Beyond Contact Information
8. More Specific Company Research
9. Self-Employed And Home Business
10. Part-Time, Contract, & Temporary Work
11. Non-Profits And Social Conscience
12. Work For Minorities
13. Work For Women
14. Work For The Disabled
Introduction: Job & Resume Sites
1. Resumes & Cover Letters
2. Portfolios
3. Job Boards: The Supersites
4. Job Boards: Job Search Engines
5. Job Boards: Regionals
6. Job Boards: The Networked Sites
7. Job Boards: College & Graduate Sites
8. Job Boards: Niche/Trade/Specialty
9. Job Boards: Diversity/Women/Disabled
10. Job Boards: Government
11. Job Boards: Contract & Temporary
12. Job Boards: Executive
13. Job Boards: International
14. Job Boards: Links To Job Boards
15. Job Boards: Articles About
16. Volunteering
Introduction: Job Hunting Online
1. Chapter One: Learn The Net
2. Chapter Two: Resumes
3. Chapter Three: The Job Boards
4. Chapter Four: Contacts And Networking
5. Chapter Five: Counseling And Testing
6. Chapter Six: Online Research
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Research on the Internet | Clustering
Research on the Internet
Introduction to Research on the Internet
1 - Directories
2 - Search Engines
3 - Best Search Engines
4 - Meta-Search Tools
5 - Clustering
6 - Specialized Search Engines
2 - Search Engines
3 - Best Search Engines
4 - Meta-Search Tools
5 - Clustering
6 - Specialized Search Engines
7 - General Research
8 - Beyond Search Engines
9 - The UnderWeb & Deep Searching
10 - Beyond the Web: Usenet & Newsgroups
11 - Evaluating the Data
12 - Grants
8 - Beyond Search Engines
9 - The UnderWeb & Deep Searching
10 - Beyond the Web: Usenet & Newsgroups
11 - Evaluating the Data
12 - Grants
Clustering
More info:
Google Bombing
One of the most popular methods for ranking search engine results involves linking: how many other web pages link to this one? The theory being that if a certain page has a lot of other sites linking to it, that alone validates the data on the page in question. And of course the converse may be true: if no one links to it, maybe the online community doesn't think the data there is so great. Not foolproof of course; lots of other sites may link to it out of human laziness (Let's save time and see where our competitors are linking) or the page may be on an obscure server, or not meet the criteria for the search engines bots, and so on. In practice, it's generally more complex than the simplistic portrait I have painted, but with many engines, offsite linking is the primary factor affecting what is at the top of the page (and what isn't) when a search engine returns the results of a query. (This has led to an interesting practice called Google bombing. Google Bombing
Clusty
Mooter
Kartoo
Clusty is a meta-search engine that allows you to choose the way your query results are clustered. Do you want it grouped by topic? By source? By URL? Like many search engines, sponsored results are at the top of the list, but they are clearly labeled and separated from relevant results.
Mooter
Mooter's clusters are presented as a graphical formation resembling the spokes of a wheel. You can choose one of the spokes, where the clusters are broken down even further: it's pretty interesting. I was a bit disappointed that Mooter seems to return more sponsored results than most of the clustering-type search engines.
Kartoo
This site takes the graphical presentation of clusters one step further; if you have Macromedia's Flash player installed (easy enough to get if you don't, and installation is more or less automatic once you agree to the legal stuff), Kartoo also uses a graphical interface to show you not only the various clusters, but it also draws lines showing the various relationships between the clusters. I don't know how meaningful it is, but it sure looks cool. Kartoo is not the fastest search engine on the Web; but it does have some neat features that I encourage you to explore.
More On Google Bombing
Because many search engines use the number of site links to gauge how to rank a site's data, it doesn't take too many people with web pages to get together and skew the ranking of the data that search engines return. In 2003, some people got together and caused the query phrase "miserable failure", when typed into the major search engines, to return President Bush's biography from the White House web site. And of course Bush supporters then Google bombed Hilary Clinton, Michael Moore, and others. You can read more about Google bombing at here and here.
Some companies with compromised ethics (somewhat of an oxymoron, perhaps) will use this technique to skew results so that they will start getting more favorable ranking in search results, or cause their competitors to get lower rankings. It's a good reason not to depend on any single search engine, no matter how good it may be.
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