(02/12/07) Now that I'm a freelance senior IT consultant, I've started to put myself on the job boards again. I usually go on a local job board called JobCircle. I've also used HotJobs. I was pleasantly surprised tonight to find out an old favorite, Dice, has an improved search interface. Dice's new navigation uses a technique some call 'Guided Navigation'. You go to a starting point to get a list of jobs. Once you're there, you can shave down your search across several different dimensions. In my case, I wanted to look for gigs that accepted Inpedendent Contractors and required no travel. Guided navigation is more than just a pretty AJAX Web 2.0 thingy. It's actually useful and in my case, helps me look for exactly the work situation I am trying to find. With the other sites, I still have to send an email of interest to the employer before I find out if they will accept independent contractors or if the gig requires travel. Dice can do this because it enforces some codification of job offerings along these very useful dimensions. I plan to use Dice to find my next gig when my 3 month contract is up. Guided navigation is decidedly an attractive, competitive advantage for Dice over the other job boards. Below is the criteria I tried out. You can see that you can add dimensions to the search and Dice shows in parenthesis how many jobs fall along those dimensional buckets (i.e. State,City,Travel,Employment Type). Bravo, Dice! If you are interested in implementing guided navigation, Endeca software does a good job at giving you this.