Easy Sourcing with NO Boolean

Lots has been said about using the natural language to search for potential candidates. Examples would be “I am a Software Engineer at Microsoft” or “earned her MBA from Wharton”. It’s a fruitful technique.

Here is a different twist on searching in English. Suppose we wanted to find LinkedIn profiles on Google, but doing so without the operator site: or any other operators. It turns out, it is quite possible. All we need to do is to identify a phrase (or several phrases) that:

1. Appear on every profile
2. Don’t appear on other pages, that are not profiles.

Here is an example search, using a phrase present on LinkedIn public profiles (those that are in English, of course) :”500 million other professionals”.

linkedin “500 million other professionals” “head of localization”

Even if we drop the word linkedin from search, the results will be pretty much all LinkedIn profiles:

“500 million other professionals” “head of localization”:

We can use alternative phrases to single out LinkedIn profiles, for example: “full profile it’s free”. Here is a search:

“full profile it’s free” registered nurse ICU

For Twitter, we can search for the common element “”tweets & replies”:

“tweets & replies” biotech conference.

For Meetup and Github, “member since” is a good token to use.

Who can suggest other examples?

Check out the new online class Sourcing without Boolean.

For those who do like Boolean searches: my e-Book “300 Best Boolean Strings” is out of the press and has almost 400 search strings for all occasions.