Sort Order Exploration

While many people are trying to guess how the search results are sorted on LinkedIn now – there are, apparently, several factors that are taken to account, in an attempt to make the search order more “semantic” and more satisfactory for the person who is doing the search – let me share a very interesting, easy-to-interpret, sort order in some searches, that you may not have seen before.

This is available only in LIR (LinkedIn Recruiter) and these are the results of a search with no keywords and no facets specified. By the way, you can also see today’s total number of profiles when doing this search; it was 279,790,775 when I ran it a few minutes ago. For the screenshot, I have left the first eight names and taglines and removed the detailed previews. (For the record, all 8 profiles are public.)

If you have a LIR subscription, here’s how to reproduce the search: start with a keyword, then select 1st, 2nd, and 3rd connections using checkboxes, then remove the keyword, and you will see “everyone”.

Now, for this search the order of the profiles is very specific and depends exactly on one value. The list of people is shown in the order of…

Guess what it is!

The same search order remains in place if you narrow the search down to a country, to an industry, and to a few more select-a-value type of search facets.

Why is this search order relevant? That I don’t know. But the results are quite interesting to review.