By Mark A. Whittaker

Indeed.com, the world’s busiest jobs site, today launched “Indeed Resume,” which allows any employer to search the site’s database of more than 1 million resumes for free.

Before today, Indeed sold pay-per-click job postings to employers but had no mechanism that allowed employers to search Indeed’s entire database of resumes.

“We wanted to do for resume search what we’ve done for job search,” Chris Hyams, vice president of product for Indeed, said during a preview webinar Wednesday. That meant creating a resume search engine that was simple, comprehensive and enables employers to find relevant results, he said.

Indeed Resume will be entirely free to use during a beta period, end of which hasn’t been determined. That will give Indeed a chance to see how it’s being used before it finalizes pricing, Hyams said. After the beta period, employers will still be able to search resumes for free, but there will be fees associated with contacting job seekers. Those fees will be “pay for performance” based on use and value. There will be no flat membership fees, he said.

The pricing and ease of use should allow any size business to afford Indeed Resume, he said.

Hyams demonstrated the site Wednesday, and gave reporters access to the site to try it out. Searching for resumes takes only a few steps, starting with typing a job title or job keyword into a search box. Employers can narrow the results by location, by education, by experience, by job titles previously held by the job seeker and even by companies listed as previous employers by job seekers.

The search resembles Google’s auto-fill technology. As soon as you start typing a keyword, Indeed Resume suggests options, and the search results change as the searcher continues to type. The enhancement improves search speed, Hyams said.

Search results are displayed several ways — a detailed format that displays some basic information from the resume, a list format and a minimal format. With all three, however, an expanded view of the resume appears on mousing over the job seeker’s name.

As with any search engine, the results aren’t perfect. In a search for “cooks,” we turned up a resume by bank teller whose last name is Cook and a number of resumes from people who listed previous experience as cooks but who were seeking different types of jobs.

The search results do not display job seekers’ contact information. If an employer wants to reach out to a job seeker, they must go through Indeed. Contact information is released only if the job seeker replies to the initial contact, Hyams said.

Employers can set up unlimited saved searches and receive daily emails with new and updated resumes matching their search criteria.

Indeed is the number one job site worldwide, with more than 50 million unique visitors and 1 billion job searches per month. Indeed is available in more than 50 countries and 26 languages.

Since 2004, Indeed has given job seekers free access to millions of jobs from thousands of company websites and job boards. It is a privately held company founded by Paul Forster and Rony Kahan, with investors including The New York Times Company, Allen & Company, and Union Square Ventures.

Indeed has offices in Austin, Texas; Mountain View, Calif.; New York City; Stamford, Conn.; and London, UK.