DIY Yahoo! Pipes

You can make your own personal search engine using Yahoo! Pipes. Yahoo! Pipes uses drag and drop modules into a sandbox that you can use to remix your RSS feeds, searches from Yahoo! Local and the Google Base. You can also add a filter to sort by job title (didn't work so well in the one that I created for library jobs) and sort by publication date (field needs to be filled in the original RSS to really work).


I also used some RSS fields from some vertical search engines (Eluta, WowJobs and Indeed Canada) to give it some power. You can tinker even more with their feeds by adding the province or state that you would like to work in and get a better geographical fix when you run your searches.

Now, you don't have to cobble together your own pipe: you can use the pre-existing pipes (there are about 10 for library jobs). You can also easily clone one that you like and make some changes, provided that you have a Yahoo! account.

I did notice something weird looking for library jobs as my keyword: I got lots of pipes for lesbian (oh, yes, the first thing I think of when I hear librarian, so easy to confuse the two). Trying to remove the erotic search engines just didn't seem to work (maybe they use librarian or library as a tag?). I found lots of erotic pipes (ha ha!) on the Yahoo! Pipes service, so you may not be able to get results from the pipes service if you are running a family friendly search or are behind a finicky filter.