We’ve extended our desktop-based Job-Search solution to include the Google Desktop Gadget platform.  The Google desktop platform offers exciting opportunities as it is supported on Windows, Linux and Mac OS-X, therefore we’re hoping that more of you will be able to take advantage of our excellent job search capabilities in order to find your next job.

You can find the gadget on the Google Gadget Directory – however you can also download it direct from us.

Update – 14th October 2009: We’ve now released version 0.2 of this gadget – now you have extra options that you can use to tweak your search so you get only the results that you want.

Following on from the recent release of v0.3 of the Windows Sidebar Gadget, as promised we’ve now updated our Google Gadget to include most of the same feature-set.

If you want to go and test drive it now, simply go ahead and download it!  If you’ve previously downloaded it from the Google Gadget Directory, then you can still download it straight from us – but it’ll also appear as an update in your gadget list after few days of it being live.

So what’s changed?

The original gadget allowed you to search for jobs with a particular skills keyword search, in a particular location and country.  The first minor improvement we’ve made is to add a new country: ‘All’:

As you can see above – the country selection is ‘All countries and areas’.  Be careful with this one if you are after a single location in the world.  In the query above, for example, I’ve searched for SQL jobs in ‘London’.  This could mean London, UK; or London, ON in Canada (or indeed any one of the other numerous locations around the world that are called ‘London’.

Other classic ambiguous locations are Birmingham, Cleveland and Colchester (all UK/US location cross-overs); of course we can’t provide an exhaustive list here!

The real power of a worldwide search, however, is if you are the kind of person who regularly moves all around the world – the IT contractors among you, for example may well fit into this category.

The Options Dialog

Talking of Contractors, we also have four new options that you can use to modify your search.  You’ll notice the spanner/wrench icon next to the ‘search’ button above.  Clicking on this launches the new options dialog:

The emphasis here is functionality – not look and feel!

A quick run through of the different options:

1. Job Type: Select from Any (the original default), Permanent or Contract.
2. Per Page: The results from our web services are paged, previously you were fixed to 20 results per page, but now you can configure it in steps up to a maximum of 100 jobs per page.
3. Job Age: The previous search defaulted to pages posted in the last 7 days.  Now you can select from 1 to 7 days; as well as the ‘Today Only’ option – which will include only jobs posted since midnight GMT today.
4. Distance: Allows you to specify the maximum distance a job is allowed to be from your specified location in order to be included in your search.  There is no unit selection (miles/km) because it is interpreted differently according to the country in which you search.  E.g. on a UK search the value is interpreted as miles, but on a US search it’s interpreted as kilometres.

What’s next?

The next iteration will see industry selection and ‘email me this job’ functionality which we have already released in our Windows Sidebar Gadget.  We will endeavour to get this out as soon as possible, but we hope in the meantime that this will satiate your job-searching needs!

As always, keep coming back to this site, or subscribe to our Atom feed – as we have some very exciting developments on the way in the next few months!