Googling for LinkedIn Profiles

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This is a refresher on searching for LinkedIn profiles via Google (“X-Raying” LinkedIn) and links to a Custom Search Engine for those who don’t want to write complex Boolean Strings.

LinkedIn has many public pages that Google indexes: profiles, company pages, job posts, and more.

Public member profiles have URLs that include either “/in” or “/pub” after “linkedin.com” – for example, https://ch.linkedin.com/in/sarahsantacroce and https://www.linkedin.com/pub/sarah-santacroce/72/b33/508

To find any pages on LinkedIn, use the search string site:linkedin.com on Google.
To find public profiles, use
site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub

To make things slightly complicated, LinkedIn puts “directories” of profiles under “/pub” as well;  for example:
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/Sarah/Santacroce

To exclude those directories in the search results and see the public profiles only, use exactly this Boolean String template on Google:

site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub -pub.dir (add keywords).

To avoid the “/in’s” and “/pub’s” in the search syntax you can use this Google custom search engine:

>>> https://bitly.com/Search-LI (just enter the keywords).

 

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