PowerShell Solves a Mystery

Mon, Jul 17, 2006 One-minute read

One of Raymond Chen’s readers recently noticed that Google purchased AdWords for Raymond’s name.  The destination of the sponsored link?  http://www.google.com/jobs :)

This came up on our internal bloggers alias, so people started poking around to see what other bloggers / blog readership had outstanding “job offers.”  Not being one for repetitive, manual computer labour, I let PowerShell definitively answer the question.

In a temporary Outlook message, I expanded the alias so that it listed the names of all members.  I saved that into a text file, and ran the following script:

[C:\temp]
PS:6 > gc bloggers.txt -delimiter “;” |
>>    % { $_ | where { $wc.DownloadString("http://www.google.com/search?q={0}" -f $_) -match “Want to work” } }
>>
 Brad Abrams;
 Eric Gunnerson;
 Raymond Chen;

A bit easier than searching for the 965 members of that alias by hand!