X-Ray for US Profiles: Solved

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This Custom Search Engine –

bit.ly/LinkedIn-US

– searches for US-based LinkedIn profiles only. You can try to fool it, searching by a location in another country, but the results will stay on target. How does it do that?

X-Ray practitioners know that we can narrow to a country – any but the US – using a two-letter country abbreviation, e.g., site:fr.linkedin.com/in. Not so for the US – our profiles do not live under such a domain (not under us.linkedin.com/in). Instead, they use links starting with www – but so do numerous profiles in other countries. Many members (unknowingly) have several public profiles – one under, say, fr.linkedin.com/in and a copy starting with www.linkedin.com/in with the same ending. You see where the difficulty lies.

“How to X-Ray for US profiles only?” is a frequently asked question from our students.

If you select the United States under the “region” setting in the Advanced Search and then search, the results will not be perfect, but they will be pretty good. Here is an example:

site:www.linkedin.com/in marketing director “paris, france.”

Even though I had asked to search for Paris, the top results are US-based. However, the results are not perfect – some,e Parisians will be there as well and possible people from elsewhere.

The CSE above is built on the same principle. However, CSEs follow the region setting precisely. You will have no false positives using it:

Now let us get back to other country-based profiles. I recommend X-Raying for them in the same way, using (just) linkedin.com/in as the site to search when Googling. Create a CSE following the same idea. Compared to using the country abbreviation, you will also find profiles that Google indexed only under www – which happens quite a bit.

So, now we know a clean way to X-Ray for the US and other countries – and this is yet another advantage of Custom Search Engines!

I am happy to share that David Galley and my book about CSEs will be available soon. You will find it here:

 

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