It’s great to have tools that sort, browse and filter our search results. This saves time – and may allow us to perform more loose searches knowing that we can parse results later and go through them quickly.
The best set of free tools I know of, and many of you have heard of it as well, is called Outwit. It is a set of Firefox extensions. I’d like to bring your attention to one function in the Firefox extension called Outwit Hub called “guess“. The screenshots below show a search for people on LinkedIn and the guess function in action.
(Please notice, I’ve chosen to use a customized view of search results on LinkedIn):
And here are the results. Look, it parses the profiles! We now have columns with the first, last name, profile URL, location, industry, and the current title/company. You can export the results into Excel.
Comments 6
Interesting article. I can’t get it to work though. I’ve used the same customized LinkedIn view, but “guess” doesn’t parse the information right. For example: it doesn’t present columns for last name and last name. Any ideas of what the problem is?
Sorry if this is posted twice, but I would like to mention that I am having the same issue as Tom spoke about. This is a function I would love to use, but would like to know what I need to do to make it work!
OK, I’ve figured it out. It is pretty powerful but mostly on a certain type of cases: it needs to find recurring labels to understand the structure, so it will only work well if you have enough data items (or rows, or records). Typically, it will do a great job if the labels are repeated (like name:xxxx; size:yyy; price:zzz…) or the fields use a common style (bold, font, etc.) It’s not magics, but it’s quite intelligent. I like it. Thanks a lot for your post Irina! It made me discover Outwit. Guess is only one function, but the whole thing is fantastic.
Yes, exactly!
Thanks,
Irina
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