By By Brendan O’Reilly
College students in Hemstead and the surrounding areas can now access a wide array of classified and auction ads through a Web site designed to meet their academic and living needs.
Oodle.com, which was launched in March, recently created a new sub-site, Hofstra.oodle.com.
Oodle’s services are completely free and currently available for 33 cities, with new cities added every few weeks.
Oodle, however, is not a listing service, and the engine searches many classified and auction sites and newspapers to provide comprehensive results – all from a specific area.
Oodle focuses on the searchers, rather than the listers, by bringing many sources to one place, providing an RSS feed and allowing users to sign up for e-mail alerts to notify them when new listings are added to a catergory they are interested in.
Searches can also be refined by price and distance.
Last summer, Oodle’s interns reasoned that college-specific sites would be useful because students are in need of cheap furniture, appliances, housing, jobs or internships.
Now, more than 100 colleges have their own Oodle site to cater to their students’ needs.
To simplify searching, the categories on Hofstra.oodle.com reflect students’ needs such as a textbook category.
The main categories are For Sale, Cars, Housing, Jobs and Services, though there is no personals section like on Craigslist.org.
Oodle also offers college newspapers the opportunity to have their classified section added to the site at no cost.
The site has many functions for the bored Websurfer that are both useful and fun, said Oodle.com employee Zuzana Fedorkova.
The site uses GoogleMaps with virtual pushpins to show the exact location of where one can find what he is looking for.
“The maps can be really fun,” Fedorkova said.
She also encouraged users to investigate the “Give Locally” tab, which brings up a list of local charities where students can donate their old clothes, books and furniture rather than letting them go to waste.
It also provides a list of volunteer opportunities in the New York area and enables users to suggest charities for Oodle to add.
“Oodle is useful if you already know what you want for a job or internship,” Rebbecca Hom, a sophomore sociology major, said. “The site does make it easy to find what you want, but it does not help users who are unsure of what they are looking for by offering suggestions.”
Oodle is currently in Beta testing, though the company plans to expand functionality of its college-specific sites and welcomes suggestions, Fedorkova said.