fish4 Mobile live

Today we launched fish4 Mobile. This is a version of the fish4 website aimed at mobile devices. It is HTML rather than WAP based so you can also view it using your PC. We feel it is functionally richer and a better user experience than our competitors mobile websites. We will be making several changes to it over the next couple of weeks to improve it further. The initial release contains mobile websites for fish4homes and fish4cars however fish4lettings and fish4jobs mobile websites will be launched very soon.

fish4jobs RSS functionality live

Today we launched our RSS functionality for fish4jobs. Given the market share of Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Vista, which both have RSS clients; we felt the time was right to launch RSS functionality. RSS for fish4homes, fish4lettings, fish4cars, etc. coming soon.

Fast Search & Transfer lets go of 148 employees

Details here and here

My old univeristy

My old university (Loughborough University) seems to be doing well still.

Microsoft and Logitech webcam software bloat

My brother has moved to New York and we agreed to purchase webcam’s so our young children can see each other growing up as they chat each week.

I have just purchased a Microsoft LifeCam VX-1000 from PC World. No doubt I could have purchased it cheaper online but at £19.99 I couldn’t wait.

The instructions recommended downloading the latest software from the Microsoft website. This wasn’t too bad but could have been a little easier.

What shocked me was the software was over 110MB!!!

That is totally unacceptable. The number of software bugs in 110MB of compressed compiled code must be huge.

I know the Microsoft LiveCam software isn’t unique when it comes to code bloat. At the weekend I helped my mother install her new Windows Vista PC only to find the Logitech software was a similar size download. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Microsoft LiveCam is a rebranded Logitech.

This is taking code bloat to the extreme! Shame on Microsoft and Logitech for writing such code bloat.

Monster.com attack steals user data

According to this BBC article

New fish4jobs CV Database website launched

Yesterday we launched our new CV Database website.

The new website is powered by FAST ESP 5.0.9. It was developed using Groovy and Grails. We have adopted Groovy and Grails to speed up development and make development more agile whilst delivering higher quality code.

Improvements over the old CV Database website include

•	More user friendly interface
•	Guided navigation (filters)
•	Did you mean? / spell checking
•	Improved wildcard support (multiple, beginning, middle and end of search term)
•	Intelligent snippet
•	Search term highlighting
•	Synonym highlighting (different colour to original search term for clarity)
•	Last viewed and last downloaded indicators
•	Dashboard (indicates freshness and breakdown by industry sectors)
•	Virtually unlimited results
•	Even better search performance

We will be launching many more improvements over the next few months.

The challenge of search

One of the biggest challenges of a Job Board is understanding what a candidate is searching for and returning relevant job adverts. This sounds easy but is much harder than it appears!

For example in the last 32 days candidates have searched for Fork Lift Truck Driver jobs in over 839 different ways using fish4jobs. The following represent the 30 most commonly entered searches for Fork Lift Truck Driver jobs from the 839 in the last 32 days.

forklift driver
forklift
fork lift driver
flt
fork lift
flt driver
fork lift truck driver
fork lift truck
forklift truck driver
forklift drivers
flt drivers
fork truck driver
forklift operator
forklift OR warehouse
forklift truck
fork lift truck drivers
fork truck
fork lift truck operator
fork lift drivers
forktruck driver
fork
warehouse OR forklift
warehouse OR flt
forkliftdriver
fork lift operator
forklift truck drivers
fork truck drivers
flt OR warehouse
telescopic forklift driver
warehouse OR forklift driver

We go to great lengths to understand what people are searching for and return relevant job adverts.

For instance our search engine understands that FLT Driver has the same meaning as Fork Lift Truck Driver.

fish4 presents competitors search engine deficiencies to advertising agencies

Joe (CEO) and I (CTO) presented at this meeting with advertising agencies.

I presented fish4’s product roadmap and showed the many weaknesses of our competitors search engines, i.e. www.monster.co.uk, www.totaljobs.com, www.jobsite.co.uk and www.jobserve.com

I will blog more about our competitors search engine weaknesses soon but for now trying searching for “clerk” and “clerks” separately and note the different number of results returned!