IT employers could benefit from a new location-based job search site launched today by online mapping firm Zubed Geospatial and endorsed by the Conservative Party.

Zubed Maps uses semantic search technology and artificial intelligence to crawl the web sites of around 1.8 million companies, searching out and interpreting any job vacancies and displaying them on a map-based interface.

The tool will be useful for job seekers looking for work closer to home, for example, while employers can register their details and post any vacancies in a few clicks.

"We are now at a position where there are over 100,000 jobs on the site, and these are vacancies which would traditionally have been tucked away on organisations' web sites," said Zubed Geospatial chief executive Ian Haynes.

"It's about local jobs for local people. If you ask a candidate whether they would choose a similar job closer to home, they would say yes."

The service has been launched in beta, as its semantic technology is still being fine-tuned to eradicate any false positives. The service could easily be extended to overseas countries such as the US, according to Haynes.

Zubed Maps has even won the backing of the Conservative Party, which said that the service "could make a real difference right now to many businesses and job seekers".