Searching LinkedIn From Google: Hit and Miss

booleanstrings Uncategorized 3 Comments

Many of us X-ray LinkedIn from Google. If we are looking for profiles with certain keywords, we use the string

site:linkedin.com inurl:in OR inurl:pub -inurl:dir -inurl:jobs <your keywords here> …

Strangely though, Google forgets to add many words that belong to all LinkedIn profiles as keywords. If you search for “Public profile powered by”, industry, connections, current, past, etc., Google will miss many relevant results. It might be interesting, say, to look for people with few connections using the num-range expression  “1..10 connections”; alas, the majority of the results will be missed.

Yahoo does a better job at this; keep in mind though that the Yahoo search engine (initially created by folks at Inktomi) is going away by the end of 2010.

Comments 3

  1. I have found that the same search can bring back a different number of results over time. I can use a search string and get 6,000 results one time and 8,000 a few days later. I was hoping I wasn’t the only one seeing these types of results!

  2. I just re-ran a LinkedIn search I did yesterday to see if I would get some different/additional results using Shally’s suggestion. I only got one result that I had looked at before, and that one was from the US. All the rest were from other countries. Struck me as strange.

  3. Pingback: Searching LinkedIn with Google and Yahoo for Free

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