Indeed Widget – A Review

Indeed.com is a vertical search engine for jobs.  Visitors can simultaneously search thousands of job sites such as Monster, HotJobs, and Craigslist by qualifiers such as key word, job title, company name, and location.  Results are shown in search result format, with job listings most closely matching the user’s query appearing first.

The Indeed widget allows publishers to display Indeed job search results for select key words on their own site or blog.  The job listings displayed in the widget can be tailored towards a specific geography, or targeted towards the location of each individual reader of the blog.

Applications and Opportunity

If you think of blogs as mini communities built around themes, it’s easy to see how the Indeed widget could become a sidebar mainstay for professional themed sites.

Take for example SexyWidget.com.  As a blog devoted to exploring the world of widgets, this blog has attracted a small community of likeminded readers.  Providing a dynamically updated list of jobs related to widgets is an extremely valuable service, and one that will almost certainly become a permanent fixture on this site.

When you consider that there are already blogs out there that cover just about every professional niche that could benefit from providing complementary content in the area of job listings, the potential user base for the Indeed.com widget starts to look pretty significant.

Corporate blogs are another possible consumer of the Indeed widget.  Because widgets can be configured by company name, it’s an easy process to set up a widget targeting jobs within your company.  This market may be better served by the original publisher of the job listing via a secure account, however.  I can see the possibility of competitor job listings infiltrating a company targeted widget (e.g. “Not happy with your Google software engineering job?  Come work for Yahoo!”)

If the lure of fresh, complementary content is not enough to convince a blog publisher to use an Indeed widget, Indeed also offers an affiliate program that pays the publisher to drive traffic to Indeed.com.  Earnings appear to be calculated on a per click basis, though it’s unclear to me how much the program pays out.

Configuration and Testing

The Indeed widget (“Jobroll”) can be found by clicking the “tools” link in the site’s footer, and then clicking “Webmaster Tools.”

The widget configuration tool allows you set your key words, to choose how many job listings you would like to display in your widget, and indicate what geography you would like to target.  Leaving the geography field blank causes Indeed to target the job listings to the geography of the reader.

Additional widget configurations (color, width, etc.) can be managed by going into the code.

I had no problems adding the Indeed widget for either my Blogger or TypePad sidebars.  Because this is a script-based widget, it won’t work on MySpace or other communities that don’t allow scripts.

Overall, I found the widget configuration process to be simple, clean, and easy.  My only recommendation would be to include a link to the widget configuration tool right in the “tools” section, as opposed to making the user click through to “Webmaster Tools.”  I’m not convinced that most bloggers think of themselves as webmasters.

Editorial

This is a very solid widget play with potentially broad appeal.  Indeed has done a great job creating an easy to use widget that is extremely useful.  I also like how Indeed taps into the selfish interest of the blogger through its affiliate program.

I think that there are three primary reasons why bloggers add widgets to their blogs; 1) To provide their readers with complementary content / functionality; 2) to share information about themselves; and 3) selfish interest (cash, promotion, etc.)

The Indeed widget addresses two of these areas very nicely.  In particular, it will be interesting to watch their affiliate program evolve.  We all know how Google AdSense has worked out for Google, and clearly Indeed is hoping to do something similar with their widget-driven affiliate program.

But the primary value of the Indeed widget will be to help them get the word out.  In a Google dominated world, vertical search engines face a unique challenge.  Simply beating Google on functionality / usefulness for a given vertical will most likely not be enough.  Vertical search engines also need to find a way to let the world know they exist, and that “Googling” something (or visiting a walled garden publisher) may not always be the best way to find what they are looking for.

It is in this area that the Indeed widget could become a critical success factor for Indeed.