Unemployment has been a major concern for Americans over the past couple of years, but we get a bit of good news that job openings rose by 7.6% in January, compared with December.

Indicating that employers are at least starting to hire again, new job openings rose to 2.7 million. This is the highest level since back in February 2009.

Last Friday, I talked to Paul Forster, who is the CEO and co-founder of Indeed.com, a job search engine. Before this, he created Jobsinthemoney, which is a great site to locate finance jobs.

And, yes, Paul has a background in finance. He was an investment manager at International Finance Corporation and has an MBA from INSEAD business school.

As for Indeed, Paul has indeed been busy. One of the latest cool features is Salary Search. It's pretty easy to use: Just enter the description of your job and you will get a salary estimate. There is also a statistical confidence level to get an idea of the general accuracy of the estimate.

True, there are a variety of salary calculators on the Web. But Indeed's has a twist. Basically, it analyzes huge amounts of data on classified ads (over 50 million).

Some of the features on the system help with dilemmas such as: Do big companies pay more? What's the salary for a Web 2.0 AJAX programmer? Should I get that MBA? What does a Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) programmer make compared to one at Google (NASDAQ:GOOG)?

It's certainly fun to try out and may provide some ammunition for your next gig.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and the EDGAR-Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.