Easy Sourcing with NO Boolean

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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 …

Nine Association X-Ray Templates

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Association sites are an excellent source of professional and contact information. Are you familiar with associations in your industry? Finding them is as easy as Googling for <industry name> <location name> association. When I research an association site, I am interested in pages with lists of members and in contact information (that will let me look up additional background). Here are …

Facebook Research Hacks

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Facebook member’s groups, posts, comments, and events that we are allowed to see per member’s privacy settings can help us identify professional details on potential candidates – as well as find additional candidates. Unfortunately, this information not that easy to search for any longer, ever since Facebook retired its “official” Graph search. Here are some simple but useful “ex-Graph” searches, …

Least Understood Google Operator

booleanstrings Boolean, Google 2 Comments

Arguably, the least understood Google operator is inanchor: Google’s advanced search documentation has lost the level of detail it used to have just a few years ago. It no longer describes inanchor: and quite a few other operators. What [ inanchor:keyword ] means, is – search for pages, links (anchors) to which from other pages have the keyword (or key …

How To Get Your Google Search History

booleanstrings Boolean, Google 1 Comment

Google keeps your search history (and lots of other data), even if you clear the browser’s cache, and allows to download the history. Here is how to get your Search History for the last few years in a convenient Excel format. On your Google Take-Out, select (only) “Searches”. Google will create an archive of your searches, which you can download as JSON …

Get Ten Boolean Strings Free

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To Boolean Strings Enthusiasts: I will publish the 3rd edition of the e-book “300 Best Boolean Strings” in January 2018. In the meantime, you can preorder the book at http://booleanbook.com. (If you were wondering, by now, over six hundred of your colleagues have purchased the book and seem quite happy with it!) I’ve rolled ten (10) new interesting Boolean Strings from the upcoming edition …

Custom Search for Recently Updated Profiles

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Googling for recently updated profiles is a tricky business. However, Custom Search Engines, with their fascinating capabilities, allow us to set up sorting by date in the settings, making convenient UI to searching for pages that have been recently updated. If you were wondering, search results for the same query, 1) sorted by relevance and 2) sorted by date, as …

X Marks the Spot

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The Twitter Advanced Search Dialog allows to search by city, for example, “San Francisco, CA” – but did you know you can search for a (Latitude, Longitude) location with a radius as small as 0.01 miles? To find the (Latitude, Longitude) for a spot on the map, right-mouse-click in Google Maps and choose “What’s There?”. As an example, I have copied …

2017 Changes to Four Major Tools

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Long ago, in a previous life, I was interviewing at a start-up, and a tired interviewer, noticing that my degree was in Math, sighed and said: “Mathematics is great! The fundamentals stay the same, always. You can count on them not to change”. True! (Obviously, the amount of change at that company was overwhelming at the time). Axioms are true and stay …

Fascinating: Custom Headline Search

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I must admit that until I started using the search technique that I am about to describe, I did not realize that a significant number of LinkedIn members customize their Headlines. I had expected most members to stay with the default Headline, which is <Job Title> at <Company>. Not true. It won’t be easy to estimate the percentage of customized …