Back during the dot.com boom, people were thinking that the Internet would be good for everything. You could sell books on it, that was obvious. But you could also sell pet food, and groceries, and fashionable clothing. And soon all the travel agencies and banks would be closing their branches because everyone would be buying their airline tickets online and doing their banking online. And no one was going to buy newspapers anymore because everyone was going to read their news online. And so forth and so on, breathlessly.

And then the bubble burst, and what remained? There were a few things that you actually could do better on the net than off, and one those turned out to be job hunting.
A handful of very big companies have set up some very big websites to do online recruitment and these have turned out to be a very lucrative business. One of the giants, monster.com, claims to have 800,000 jobs on offer. Yahoo’s HotJobs site is not far behind.
The business has gotten so large that there are even magazines dedicated to the online recruitment “industry”. One of these, “Online Recruitment”, claims to know of over 3,000 websites dedicated to helping people find a job.
Many of these websites offer fairly powerful back-end databases