Hello Sourcers and Internet Researchers:
Here are some questions, that I would like to offer, based on just one collection of professional data, that has an interesting implementation, and that is – documents uploaded to LinkedIn by its members.
How good are you at understanding what data can be found and how?
Please post your answers as comments – and please provide your reasoning for the answer. Responses to only some of the questions are welcome. I anticipate a nice discussion here!
[Updated!] We have launched a contest based on these questions!
Deadline: Monday October 24th.
Here you go:
If a LinkedIn member, say, Joe D. wants to upload a resume (or another document) to his profile from his PC, LinkedIn will ask him whether he would like to store the document on Slideshare or not. (If you haven’t, try it, you’ll see.)
Suppose Joe said “no” to posting the resume on Slideshare and uploaded it to the profile. When we view Joe’s profile, while logged-in, we now see Joe’s document’s preview as an image (or series of images if there is more than one page).
- Joe said “no” to storing on Slideshare, so where (to which site) did it go?
- Is a preview available on Joe’s public profile? That means, is it available when you are not logged-in?
- Can the preview image(s) be viewed in an incognito window, i.e. without logging into LinkedIn?
- [Difficult] Can we download the original resume or document (say, PDF or Word)? From which site? Please note, the question is about finding the original doc, not trying to recreate it by using “print to PDF” or character recognition. 10 points
- (Easy) What does LinkedIn call the part of the profile that stores those uploaded documents?
- (5a, harder) Is there a URL pointing to that part of the profile (for logged-in members)?
- Can we find Joe’s profile by searching on LinkedIn “people search” …
- (6a) for the resume keywords, if they are not included elsewhere on his LinkedIn profile?
- (6b) for keywords in the title and description, that Joe adds when he uploads the document to the profile?
- Is there a URL that you can share with a colleague, for them to see the resume if the resume has more than one page, for example, three pages, – not on LinkedIn, but on that site, that stores the resume?
- Will Google find the uploaded original document if there are no other copies of it online? The options are “yes,” “no,” and “sometimes, when…”
- (This is a tough one!) Will Google find the uploaded original document’s image preview in the Image search? The options are “yes,” “no,” and “sometimes, when…”
- Can Yandex find Joe’s original resume?
- Can Bing find it?
- On which cloud is the document stored (Amazon, etc.)?
- BONUS Q: If a LinkedIn member opts-out of Slideshare when uploading a document, the document is still posted on Slideshare (as we now know) under some “user” account. With what email domain has that “user” registered with Slideshare? (you might want to find that user’s profile URL for starters). 10 points
To help you here’s a (randomly picked) example of a profile with an uploaded resume.
What say you? 🙂
I’ll reveal the answers in a future post.
-Irina
P.S. Just launched a formal contest around these questions. I think, these are great questions for anyone who searches, to understand the Surface, Deep, and Dark Web.