Understanding the Universal Search on LinkedIn

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LinkedIn provides a universal search box on top of the home page, to Search for people, jobs, companies, and more…

You can search for “everything” or select the type of objects to search: People, Jobs, Companies, Groups, Universities, Posts, or Inbox.

In this post, I will cover the searches for each type of the object in the Universal search dialog.

If you think you can type a Boolean expression- as an example, (Developer OR Engineer) NOT Manager – and find any of those types of objects as the Boolean logic dictates, think again. It’s actually NOT the case.

Searching for each type of object has its own rules and they are NOT the same.

  1. Search for People accepts the Boolean syntax – AND, OR, NOT, ().
  2. Search for Jobs accepts Boolean (for me, but I heard others complaining that it doesn’t)
  3. Search for Companies accepts Boolean
  4. Search for Groups is not Boolean – it always works as an AND search – compare, for example, Group search #1 and Group search #2 – the results are identical
  5. Search for Universities is not Boolean – it always works as an AND search – compare, for example, University search #1 and University search #2 – the results are identical
  6. Search for Posts is not Boolean – it always works as an OR search – compare, for example, Post search #1 and Post search #2 and Post search #3 – the results are identical
  7. Search in Inbox  is not Boolean – and it’s up to you to find out how it works 🙂

Are you surprised? (Do you think it is a little confusing how this works, given that all these searches are combined in the Universal dialog?)

There are other search dialogs in LinkedIn that do and don’t support the Boolean search syntax.

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