My business partner Julia Tverskaya and I had the pleasure of chatting with the CTO of Blekko Greg Lindahl at Sourcecon last week. Greg’s presentation was the one that we both enjoyed the most! Why should sourcers check out Blekko? Here are some reasons. Blekko is a search engine that has made creating custom search engines its major feature. They are …

In the light of my participation in the upcoming SourceCon’s “Paid Resources” panel, I thought I’d share a few thoughts on the subject. Roughly, paid resources fall into these categories: 1. Data collections, along with software to search it:  resumes; profiles; contact info; and competitive intelligence. Data may be self-entered (as in job boards or LinkedIn) or collected elsewhere (for example, Zoominfo, theSocialCV crawl the web; Jigsaw …

The key in successful search is correctly imagining what you are going to find. I recently wrote how one can construct  a Boolean search string by knowing its “anatomy“. Here’s another creative approach that may help us dig out additional good results. This time, let’s imagine a page with a link pointing to what we are looking to find, say, someone’s resume. As an …

If you search for people on LinkedIn you will see ten profiles per page. If you search within a group, it’s 20 profiles per page but it’s 10 again if you switch to advanced search. This seems pretty limiting. Here are a couple of tricks that will let you see more. Install Firefox if you don’t have it, and its …

Space is limited. Reserve your Webinar seat now at: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/402008986 If you are one of the 97% of sourcers and recruiters who search beyond job boards, chances are that you search for online profiles of potential candidates and business connections on a daily basis.There’s a problem with navigating online profiles, since social networks are all different, have different search syntax …

A Boolean search string in a search engine has its structure. Its elements are: keywords, key phrases in quotation marks, operators (like site:), and special characters (like “*” in Google). Unfortunately, this structure has little to do with what we have in mind when we search; so the challenge is to translate our search for people with certain professional background …

This site went over 100K+ hits this week… …which has prompted me to take a look at some other statistics. These nice numbers below show the growing importance of Sourcing and Internet research in our work. I have created the sites below in the last two years: http://booleanstrings.com – 100K hits LinkedIn Group (very active!) Boolean Strings: 11,000+ members. New discussions daily. Big …

Given a company domain name company.com, and the first and the last name of a person, we can construct the address – if the company follows a certain pattern in email addresses (such as fist-dot-last-at-company.com). How can we find out what the pattern might be? 1. What NOT to do Do NOT search on Google for “*@company.com” You may be lucky and find …

I find it a bit annoying when Google search decides to omit similar results – which it does most of the time! To control this behavior, we need to go to the last page with the results and click the link “repeat the search with the omitted results included”. There’s a shortcut to doing this, which is adding &filter=0 to your …

Here is a chart outlining the “core” syntax elements that most of us use daily.