Shaping Snippets for Scraping

In a recent post, How we’re improving search results when you use quotes, Google informed us that it would force the terms in quotation marks into snippets – as many as possible. It is a significant improvement for research; take note of it.

(Even before the announcement, repeating keywords and putting them in quotes helped.)

I am finding that in daily sourcing, as well as training, I have been increasing the number of search strings with quoted and repeated search terms. Here is an example.

Compare site:hu.linkedin.com/in “me at * * com OR hu” developer:

and site:hu.linkedin.com/in “me at” “me at * * com OR hu” developer:

While asterisks (*) and Boolean operators within quotation marks do not always help to alter snippets, a few words in quotes (“me at”) do.

In the second search, the snippets look reaffirming, displaying the desired info and the wording around it. But more importantly, you can scrape the emails into a list without visiting any result URLs; I recommend Julia’s Email Extractor.

Here is another example of manipulating snippets. Compare recruiter site:linkedin.com/in inanchor:opentowork -intitle:opentowork and “opentowork” recruiter site:linkedin.com/in inanchor:opentowork -intitle:opentowork.

While snippets are described as “the first piece of information that influences people’s decisions on what results to click or read,” we are here for not clicking results and being productive.