Many thanks to Hung Lee, the @Wise_Man_Say, for triggering this heated discussion on the Boolean Strings group:

• http://bit.ly/formatfinder
• https://bitly.com/documentfinder

The first search engine http://bit.ly/formatfinder searches for documents of several most popular formats: PDF, Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and Text. I’ll be adding more later. Those who are fluent in Boolean search know that files of these formats that are uploaded to the open web can be found using the operator filetype: on Google and on Bing.

Did you know, however, that many files of a certain format cannot be found through the filetype: operator? There are document storage sites such as scribd and slideshare that have thousands of those documents, but URLs for those do not have the extensions like .PDF or .docx

Here is the second search engine that searches across 12 most popular document storage sites: https://bitly.com/documentfinder

I haven’t seen CSE’s that do this. You can search across all the sites for resumes quickly and free of charge; besides, there are some resume to be found without using Boolean operators.

Enjoy!

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/779143194

(Repeating for those who couldn’t make it last time.)
The webinar is for all recruiters and sourcers who are open to increasing their productivity and are interested in finding out more about specific sourcing techniques, Boolean strings, and search engines that they have started using or have heard of.

I will:
- address sourcing questions most frequently asked on the Boolean Strings group and network
- provide an update on searching syntax and techniques that have happened because of recent Google changes
- hold a Q&A session where you could clarify issues around your current sourcing tools, methodologies, and searches for professionals online.

Outline.
1. Boolean Strings FAQ:
What are search strings to target people with given years of experience?
How do I find the names & contact info for attendees of a particular professional conference?
What are the search strings to look for job openings?

Where can I go online to learn more about Boolean Strings?
What are the best beginner training sessions and must have tools?

Should we use the operator AND?
Does the order of the words matter in a search string?
Where and how does the NEAR operator work?

How can I find the email protocol for a given company?
How do I verify an email address?

How can I find the Hidden person’s name on LinkedIn?
How do I X-ray LinkedIn to find people in a certain location?
How do I contact a person whose LinkedIn profile I have found?
Is there a way to invite a 3rd level connection on LinkedIn?
How do I send a message to a group member on LinkedIn without visiting the group?

2. Update on searching: recent changes in Google search.

3. Interactive Q and A session. Bring your questions.

I will provide an up-to-date basic comparison chart for search engines along with a list of examples (previously referenced as “the top 25 Boolean Strings” to all attendees.

Price: $79 includes unlimited Q&A on the material over email for one month. Payment page: http://bit.ly/sourcingwebinars
Title: Boolean Strings: Questions and Answers
Date: Thursday, February 2, 2012
Time: 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM PST

The challenge comes along with a free one week long trial available for all members of the Boolean Strings Network members, from 9AM January 31 till February 6. You will find the sign-up link on the site, along with some video-information on the product. (I wrote a review of the product back in November: TheSocialCV.)

Are you ready?

Please read very carefully!

CHALLENGE

• Find a Software Developer, who has written code for mobile devices, living in the San Francisco Bay Area, with the largest number of social profiles
• Find a bilingual medical professional who has a certification, anywhere in the US, with the largest number of social profiles
• Find a PhD research scientist anywhere in Europe, teaching at a major university, with the largest number of social profiles

Bonus (used in case of a tie): Find as many as possible current employees of companies making search engines, who do not reveal any professional info on their twitter profiles.

You should use TheSocialCV.com; all who sign up will get logins at 9MA Jan 31st. It’s also allowed to use other sources. Please send your entries (responses to the questions above) to contest@braingainrecruiting.com by Feb 6th. You can send additions and corrections if you like. Please explain your solutions.

Our Esteemed Panel of Judges, consisting of:

• William Fischer
• Balazs Paroczay
• Martin Lee
• Irina Shamaeva

will be reviewing all submissions and will announce the lucky winner shortly after Feb 6, 2012.

Have fun and good luck to all!

Here is a custom search engine that looks for LinkedIn profiles. Enter a name or a keywords and see the results:

LinkedIn Profiles

Now, let’s search, for example, for

physician cardiology diagnostics MD “Greater Atlanta Area”

Let’s exclude the word “recruiter” from the above search:

physician cardiology diagnostics MD “Greater Atlanta Area” -recruiter

We got fewer results.

Contest warm-up: Did we just exclude recruiters’ profiles or did we also lose any relevant (non-recruiter) profiles in the search results?

CONTEST. Please give an example where excluding a keyword that we don’t want to see on a profile (like we just did) leads to excluding relevant results. Please either use the LinkedIn custom search engine  or a search for LinkedIn profiles using your own Boolean search strings, either on Google or on Bing. Please explain how this happens. (Or, instead, explain why this can’t happen if you believe that it can’t.) Of course, it could be a search for any type of professional in any geographical area.

The first person who sends the correct answer to contest@braingainrecruiting.com gets a guest pass to the 2-part webinar http://booleanstrings.ning.com/events/extract-candidates-from-linkedin-webinar or a pass to a future webinar.

It is amazing how “gossip” and false rumors spread online!

This post

Google Search Showing Results For Punctuation Marks

points to this post

Google Search, Punctuation Marks and Other Symbols

and viola – big news is made. Did any of the people who re-tweeted it try it out?

Here is a very simple example that shows it doesn’t work.

As the only tweeter user points out in response to my tweet, GrammarGirl (Mignon Fogarty):

Sad clarification on the “Search Google for punctuation” story. You still can’t search for STRINGS that contain punctuation.

It would take TONs of work for Google to start searching for any special characters. By the way, the very first post didn’t say it worked. It said some changes are visible.

Even if you do not really care whether Google searches for commas – it is quite interesting how everyone repeats after each other without checking, and that includes major publications.

Lessons to be learned!

Here is how to set this up.

Download Chrome if you don’t have it. Chrome is a great, fast browser.

1. Copy this: http://www.google.com/cse?cx=009462381166450434430%3A-woy8fnynf8&num=100&q=%s

2. In the Chrome search engine options, find this row at the bottom of the page:

add a “new search engine name” and a “keyword” of your choice into the first two fields; paste the copied string from above into the “URL” field.

Make this “search engine” the default. (You can go back to the previous default at any time.)

This is it!

Now, if you:

• type a person’s name in the address bar, or
• highlight the-first-and-last-name on the current page and right-mouse click,

you will be able to get to their LinkedIn profile, looked up using the custom search engine LinkedIn Profiles. Of course, this will only work if the person has a public profile.

This can also be used to instantly search for any words appearing on LinkedIn profiles, such as a name plus a keyword, or a title, or target company name(s), etc.

Let me know if it works out for you.

In this brief post I don’t aim to bring everyone up to speed. Bit I’d like to cover a list of the very basics that you may want to check for yourself. If you are way beyond this, and are open to learning more, please check out the Tools page and please consider attending the Productivity Tools webinar that I will be repeating/scheduling soon.

If you see anything basic missing, by all means, please comment below:

1. It’s time to update your hardware, the operating system, and get a fast Internet connection if you haven’t.

2. The more Internet browsers you have, the merrier. At the very least get Chrome and Firefox and do your best to stop using the Internet Explorer.

3. Update your LinkedIn profile with a photo and fill out the details. Get at least several hundred connections. Invite only those who is likely to accept your invitations; this means either people who know you or people who claim to be “open networkers”/LION’s/Toplinked.com, etc. Join a good number of LinkedIn groups; 50 is ideal.

LinkedIn is still the place number one for recruiters to be. But take marketing messages from LinkedIn with a grain of salt.

4. Learn to use at least a few advanced capabilities in Google and Bing search. Keep in mind that the Yahoo.com search is identical to Bing’s.

• Quotation marks around several words mean search for a phrase (or search for a specific word exactly) in both.
• The operator site: (lower case, no space between the operator and the URL) means search within a specified site. Recruiters call it X-raying.
• Play with the advanced search dialog on Google to train yourself to use its operators; it will guide you.
• New! Turn off the “personal” search on Google: Log out of Facebook when you search on Bing.

5. You don’t necessarily have to be on Twitter. You definitely don’t need to catch up on SEO (search engine optimization); it is changing dramatically anyway as we speak. You will need to get a profile on Google+, the sooner the better.

One last thing, don’t rely on tools that search for you automatically based on your requirements!

Join us for a Webinar on January 11

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/818321178

Productive searching for professional peoples on the Internet does not equal learning advanced Boolean search syntax on Google.

To become a Master Internet Sourcer it’s necessary to be an expert at:
- knowing what to search for (which is never just a piece of the job description)
- where to search (search engines, social media sites, each with their own search syntax)

PLUS:
- how to sort and parse search results
- how to cross-reference
- how to contact potential candidates

The last three skills are critical and are often neglected in the hunt for “the best search string” or the best site to search. The good news is that there are tools and techniques that can be applied to make sourcing productive, especially in the stages of processing search results.

On top of that, staying organized and reusing collected information and methods present their own challenge.

So how do you identify productivity tools? The area of sourcing tools is cluttered with misleading marketing messages on some of the tools; persisting under-appreciation of the sourcing function; and the pressure to perform as a recruiting function. What you pay is sometimes not what you get.

Join me at a fast-paced webinar that will go through:
- a wealth of quick short-cuts to speed up your work
- suggestions on ways to save, share with your team members, and manage the volumes of generated information
- descriptions of selected productivity tools, as well as ways to classify and assess existing and future tools.

Date: Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Time: 10AM PST/1PM EST
Duration: 90 min
Price: $79 – includes the slides, a video recording, and one month of support.

Here’s how to cross-reference names using Chrome.

Taking the tip from Find Everything Using Chrome further, we can speed up cross-referencing and avoid boring and time-consuming cutting and pasting. Let me show you how.

To start with, you can designate the “find everything” search, described in the post referenced above, to be “the default” in Chrome. Then, if you run across the name of a person who is potentially a candidate or a business contact, you can select (highlight) the first and the last name, right-click, and Google that person right from the page you are currently browsing.

This may work wonders for unique names but wouldn’t do well for common first-and-last names. To continue getting relevant results, no matter how common the name is, you can add a keyword or two relevant to the current search.

As an example, I am currently looking for Websphere developers (true story; we need about 20 of them). In the Chrome search engines options, I edit the string for the default search by adding, in my case, +websphere at the end:

Now I can either initiate a search with the automatically added word websphere - either by typing w (w, then space) in Chrome’s address bar, or right-clicking on someone’s name – like Dave Smith - and selecting the “webpshere” search from the context menu. This would search for Dave Smith Websphere on Google:

Of course, you can add words other than websphere, several keywords at once, or something like site:linkedin.com - depending on what’s most likely to help you cross-reference.

If you’d like to have access to several “context” search options, you can create several entries in Chrome’s search engines and switch between them, declaring them as “defaults” as needed. This would be a bit clumsy though. Much cooler would be to install the Chrome extension called Selection Search:

- and define variations of your search, all of which would be available from the right-click menu.

As an example, you can add items that would: search Google for the selection plus a keyword; search Google for the selection X-rayed on LinkedIn; and a search for the selected name on pipl.com:

What I personally find the most valuable in this productivity technique is the ability to narrow down your cross-referencing to particular terminology, thus staying focused on the search.

Speeds up my work many-fold.