2003/08/27

2003 08 27

Base | Research

18:45

A better Monster

Monsterboard is a great site, because it really has tons of job opportunities listed. Their business model ensures that the signal to noise ratio stays very low. (putting noise on Monsterboard is a very expensive hobby).

That said, I find that its usability lacks some features. Specifically, I find that I do searches, also do the related searches and then spent an inordinate amount of time looking at the same job ads, because it is impossible to automatically detect that I have already seen (an in most cases rejected) the ad. Especially when doing broad searches, going back over a good two months, this gets tedious pretty quickly, fast ADSL notwithstanding.

The model I am looking for is rather simple: do one or more searches, uniquefy the result set, filter it through a list of already rejected ads and present the remainder for evaluation. If this had to be built into the site, there could arguably be some logistical problems. For one thing, every user would have to have an entry in the database (easy) with associated status for every possible job ad available (not too difficult either, but a lot of work for probably not very much gain). And that is just the datamodel. Implementation, taking into account multiple simultaneous connections, a sizeable data set to work with and a user interface that is not geared towards this is a pretty hairy beast.

Not that I have any other option, but I will shortly have a go at solving this problem client side: do one or more searches, parse the output and repeat the process going forward. It will involve some scraping, but it looks easy enough.