Google Base is one of the lesser known elements in Google’s arsenal. But it can provide a quick way to find a few more resumes the next time you have an open job to fill.

Basically, the site’s a giant mess of postings users can submit for free, covering everything from junk for sale and recipe advice to dating profiles and product reviews. In other words, it’s a whole lot of crap.

But where there’s free posting, there’s usually resumes, and it just takes a simple search to find them. For example, if you’re looking for a programmer who knows JavaScript, you can run this search string:

resume programmer javascript email -inurl:job

Note: Including “email” in the search will make sure you only get results with an address to contact (for some reason, a lot of the postings don’t have any contact info). Also, the “-inurl:job” will exclude all the results that have the word “job” in the Web site address. A lot of the results you’d get otherwise are just links to vacancies listed on outside job boards. This weeds most of those out.

Here’s what the results page looks like:

It isn’t pretty. One issue is that you only get a couple lines from each item, so you don’t really know what you’re looking at until you click the link and look at the whole page. Also, you may find some postings that haven’t been updated in a few years, but you can fix that by sorting the results by date.

You may or not find anything that matches what you’re looking for. But there’s always the chance you’ll find a few resumes that weren’t in any other place you looked. And it doesn’t take a whole lot time, so it’s generally worth a try.

Read more at Jim Stroud’s Recruiters’ Lounge.