Sourcing Candidates From The Ghetto

Posted by Jim Stroud

November 15, 2005

I came across an intersting post today on Searchengine Low Down called Searching the Gheto: New Engine Delivers Surprising Results. Being overwhelmed with curiosity, I check out the searchengine mentioned in the article and discover “GhetoSearch” (and yes, I and the searchengine company are aware that “Gheto” is misspelled).

In case you are wondering the signifigance of the name, Ghetosearch reversed their search algorithm so that the least relevant results appear first and the most relevant results are last. Why do it that way? (Actually, its pretty brilliant.) If you search one of the major searchengines like Yahoo, Google or Ask Jeeves, you will get the best 1,000 results out of say… thousands of possibilities. By flipping the algorithm as Ghetosearch has, you are looking at those results that are at the bottom of the barrel (the Gheto, if you would). The advantage of this is that you may stumble across websites and resources that most would ignore or probably would never find otherwise.

Ohhh.. the possibilities! Intrigued, I jump right in and begin adding in search strings to find resumes of all sorts and get… nothing. Hmmm… maybe I am doing something wrong? I consult the help menu and play with (all of its) advanced features and… nothing. I was so dissapointed because it had such an intuitive interface, gimmicks on its advanced page uncommon to the majors. Alas for me, I could not manipulate it well enough to find resumes that I could easily source elsewhere. Grrrr… Ghetosearch, why do you tease me so?

Digability rating: Not so Dy-no-mite for resume searching, but I will keep my eye on them. Afterall, they did have some interesting features.

ADV: Do you know the art of Shakespeare Recruiting?.

###