I was reading Charlene Li’s excellent account of the launch of HotJobs crawling capability when I spotted that Jobster is buying WorkZoo. According to Charlene:

I spoke with Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg on Monday, and he described their vision of how WorkZoo will allow users to expand their search beyond their network of jobs on Jobster proper and see “every” job. WorkZoo has its cut out for them – in previous testing, they lagged significantly in their parsing ability compared to Indeed.com and Simply Hired. But this combination of Jobster and WorkZoo makes sense as a combined service – it’s also is similar to the partnership that currently exists between professional social networking service LinkedIn and SimplyHired.

The consolidation has already begun. Interesting.

John Battelle said it best in “A Good Idea, Indeed. You’re Simply Hired “: Yahoo Hotjobs is entering the Jobs search arena.

“Yahoo seems to be taking a cue from Indeed and Simply Hired. Ouch. (Thanks, Richard)”

Joel Cheesman actually posted on the topic before John, and there is an interesting discussion in the comments of his post.

Let’s see what Monster.com and CarreerBuilder’s next moves are in this new segment.

Update: SiliconBeat added their take on the news

Francois Gossieaux over at Emergence Marketing very rightly pointed out that our readers, and showcase testers, might not be familiar with our zip codes. Apologies for that.

I should mentiong that leaving the “Location” field empty uses San Carlos as the reference point for searches (it is sort in the center of Silicon Valley). And here are a few Bay Area zip codes: 94301 for Palo Alto, 94111 for San Francisco and 95113 for San Jose.

Om Malik has pointed this morning to a few applications using Google Maps to geolocate “stuff”, stuff being wireless-enabled cafes, wireless hot-spots in cities, and the now famous Craigslist meets Google Maps for having started the whole movement.

Michael Bazeley then pointed to Redfin, which combines satellite maps and MLS homes data for the Seattle area.

The O’Reilly Radar also referred to the Google Maps + Yahoo Traffic mashup that was taken down, and then brought back up.

So Glendor.com is a mashup as well then!

Finally, I found Google Maps Mania in our referrer logs:  An unofficial Google Maps blog tracking the websites, ideas and tools being influenced by Google Maps.

And this was developed before the Google Maps API was released! Which means that we might not have used all the capabilities now available.
Also make sure to zoom in the map to display the different companies with less overlap.

The following searches will give you an idea of what can be accessed on Glendor.com:

• Development jobs available 25 miles around Palo Alto, CA:  search map rss
• Software jobs listed on company websites that includes the keywords (kernel, networking, file system): search map rss
• Contract or temporary admin jobs published in the last 7 days, within 10 miles of San Francisco, CA: search map rss

Don’t be surprised if some jobs are outside of the Bay Area: we are restricting the sources to companies having operations, or their headquarter, in the Bay Area, but the jobs themselves might be anywhere in the US, or actually abroad.

Also, the precision of the mapping is at the level of the city since only rarely is the actual address of the company mentioned in the job listing. That’s why multiple jobs may overlap on one city, and clicking on one character does not display all jobs available for that city in the “bubble”.

Besides keeping you up to date on the developments of Glenbrook Networks, and the Glendor showcase, this blog will also talk about vertical search in general, and some of the technology issues that we had to solve when building our vertical search and information extraction platform.
Please tune in the RSS feed.

Glendor.com is the showcase of Glenbrook Networks, the search and information extraction platform provider.

We have chosen jobs as a vertical for this showcase because extracting listings from company web sites exercises all aspects of our technology to produce quality, structured results: surface and dynamic web crawling, layout recognition, natural language processing,…
We have also integrated a few additional features like the mapping job listings onto Google Maps, the ability to subscribe to search results via RSS feeds, and to syndicate searches on blogs or other web sites.

The showcase is providing job listings extracted from a few hundred Bay Area company web sites, and one large job board. Using it is pretty straightforward, but check out the Help section for typical queries.