Trusted Sources and Search Relevance

   

Chad Sowash, VP of Business Development at DirectEmployers, asks a great question:

   

“Why are original jobs and duplicate jobs, found on job search engines, treated in the same manner when it comes to relevancy?”

   

   

Does the source really matter when considering relevance?  After all, wouldn’t we normally consider duplicate products from two different sources to be equivalent?  If not, then I’d posit that the perceived difference (aside from price) isn’t in the product itself, but rather in the additional services and brand image of the suppliers. Bottom line, we trust some sources more than others.

   

So I think Chad is proposing that ‘trust’ be a part of the relevance calculation when he suggests that “Jobs originating and residing on corporate career sites should be weighted with more relevance than duplicate postings pulled from one or many other sources.”

   

Makes sense to me in most cases … and of course it makes sense to Google … their PageRank system gives additional weight to trusted sources when calculating relevance.  But Chad, there are a few problems:

    

First, not every ‘employer’ can be trusted.  Some ‘employers’ have scam sites phishing for personal information, while others are advertising ‘business opportunities’ that require upfront investment on the part of the jobseeker.  Sites like CareerBuilder, Monster and Dice work to weed out ads from these bogus ‘employers’ … so I think it’s fair to say that the big boards have a higher trust rating in these cases.  DirectEmployers and JobCentral don’t have to deal with this problem because the initial membership fee encourages bogus ‘employers’ to go elsewhere. 

   

Second, relevance, or at least position in the result set, is for sale on most job boards.  Let’s assume for a minute that an employer places identical information on their corporate career site, CareerBuilder, Monster and Dice, and then a vertical job search site spiders the ad from all four locations.   I’d consider all four sites trusted sources; and while it may be true that the corporate site has the highest trust rating, what if CareerBuilder was willing to pay the vertical job site to list their ad first, with the other three sources listed behind a link called ‘other sources’?  Are the results less relevant to the jobseeker?  That would hard to argue, and even if true the vertical sites are not betraying any party in doing so and they have every right to generate revenue from facilitating the connection between advertiser and jobseeker.

   

Third, does ‘freshness’ matter when determining relevance?  If an employer places the same ad every Monday, to ensure that their ad stays near the top of the list when searching by date (and so jobseekers don’t assume the opening is ‘stale’ and closed), are any of these duplicates less relevant?  It depends doesn’t it on the user … one user may want to see only the most current opening, while another may want to know that the firm is repeatedly advertising for the same position, perhaps implying high turnover.

   

So, what makes it so difficult for all of us to agree on a standard formula for relevance is that Relevance has Multiple Perspectives ... One for Each Customer:

   

“Our goals and skills are unique, so when we ‘search’, our perspectives on relevance are also unique.  However, and this is key, as a user, my perspective counts; the perspective of the job board does not.  The challenge for every job board is learning how to provide search results that meet the ‘relevance’ criteria for each and every unique user that falls within the job boards target audience.”

   

Comments

[Paul Forster]

You say 'what if CareerBuilder was willing to pay the vertical job site to list their ad first'. This is possible on Indeed.com as any job publisher can sponsor their jobs on a pay-per-click basis to get their jobs listed at the top. HOWEVER, these sponsored jobs are clearly marked as Sponsored Links so there is no conflict with the ranking of our unpaid organic results. I would be surprised if other vertical search engines don't also operate this way.

Paul
http://www.indeed.com - one search. all jobs.

[Bob Wilson]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the clarification. Indeed does an excellent job of making it clear to users which ads are 'organic' and which are 'paid placement'.

I didn't intend that section of the post to refer to 'paid placement' jobs; rather, a source might pay to be first in the organic results if there are duplicates.

For example, if I search for an IBM engineer in Houston on Indeed, you display 46 unduplicated results, plus a message that says:

"We have removed 24 job postings very similar to those already shown. To see these additional results, you may repeat your search with the omitted job postings included."

So, what if CareerBuilder and Monster both have the same IBM ad, and CareerBuilder wants to pay you to make sure that the CareerBuilder ad shows in the initial results, pushing the Monster ad into the 'similar to those already shown' category?

[Chad Sowash]

Many thanks Bob, I appreciate the knowledge.. Here's a couple quick comments..

1) No question scamming is a problem, but since JobCentral is a "trusted source" Job Search Engines could automatically "trust" those jobs provided by the JobCentral feeds which would allow for heightened organic relevance.

2) SEM(r) on JSE is smart and every company should look at PPC recruiting (sponsored ads) to supercharge their candidate traffic immediately. But this is entirely different from organic relevance. Thanks for the clarification Paul..

3) Does freshness matter as it pertains to open positions which reside on corporate career sites? No... If the position's open it's fresh and relevant.

Thanks again Bob! I'm an avid reader, keep spreading the knowledge!

[Tony M]

I'm with Chad on this one. Original jobs found on an employer's website should always be given more weight than duplicate ones found on job boards. The problem is that direct-employer jobs take more time to index and often involve less structured jobsites. I imagine most JSEs would prefer to include more direct-employer jobs, but the economics of gathering these positions make it easier to rely on the large job boards.

[Bob Wilson]

Excellent points Tony. Thanks for posting.

Bob :-)

[Tom]

did a search for VP software engineering on Indeed and Simplyhired and noticed that though both did return some jobs with the same title in the first two pages. there were also jobs in there which were not "relevant" to me. I think this is still a problem. Also interested in knowing how these new aggregators are allowed to do waht they are doing i.e. aggregating content without specific permission ( i am guessing here)from all the corporations and job boards( apart from those generous with RSS feeds). I do know that this is an industry and google leads it but is there no law moderating aggregation ?

[bob wilson]

Hi Tom,

Thanks for posting feedback.

I agree that the quality of the search results on Indeed and SimplyHired could be better ... but the same is true of almost every general job board. The technology exists to provide higher relevance, but so far the market hasn't demanded a change.

Aggregating can be problematic from a legal standpoint, but indexing generally is not ... and indexing is what Indeed and SimplyHired are doing.

The distinction between aggregating and indexing is substantial ... aggregators scrape the full contents of other sites and then display this content as their own; while indexers scrape the content to make it searchable, but they only display a snippet of the text, provide source attribution, and provide links to the original material on the original site.

Bob