As I tweeted the other day, “I celebrate each time I talk a recruiter into stopping using long ORs – or any ORs – on Google. Stop – it is an outdated, ten-year-old technique.” And I do not mean using | instead. Here are some brief notes on the subject – and I hope to convince you, too! 1. Using …
Avoid These Nine Mistakes on Google
Google indexes 35 trillion web pages. (Compare the volume with LinkedIn’s. LinkedIn profiles are 0.001% of Google’s Index!) However, mining Google is not straightforward because the web has different kinds of pages. We can search for terms in the page titles, URLs, or links to the page but usually not for values like job titles or companies. If you want …
Google CSEs Go Wild with LinkedIn URLs
This post will be of interest to those who use or create Custom Search Engines, in particular, to X-Ray LinkedIn for profiles (and avoid high LinkedIn subscription fees). The post is somewhat technical except for the first few paragraphs. We have a webinar on CSEs if you want to dig deeper into CSEs. You might have noticed that the LinkedIn …
Scrape Google Maps
If you are sourcing for professionals who provide services such as Accounting, or looking for office locations for a specific company, searching on Google Maps will provide valuable information. Scraping a Maps search results page allows you to filter and enrich the data, and you can do it quite simply, with no coding involved. PhantomBuster is a wonderful collection of …
Hack: Use 500 Keywords, Not 32, on Google
Google’s limit of keywords is 32. It’s a challenge for long OR searches, especially for diversity sourcing – for example, searching for women’s first names, Latino last names, or diversity colleges. I am no fan of long ORs on Google (definitely not to list synonyms for a word), but in cases like the above, or searching for target companies or …
Knowledge Graph Objects in Google CSEs (True Semantic Search!)
As I was finishing the “Hacks” slides for my favorite conference, Sourcing Summit Europe, I stumbled across something I hadn’t seen before. Google Custom Search Engines (CSEs) got a new setting in the control panel: We can now select Knowledge Graph Objects to restrict the search! I was intrigued; David Galley and I spent some time researching what the …
New: Google College Search
While Google has posted a blog about college search, they did not tell us how to get to that advanced college search dialog, which looks like this for me: You can search through tons of useful info – Program, Location, Average cost. Tuition, Type, State, Acceptance rate, Size, and Campus setting. The secret to getting to this dialog is adding …
Google filetype: News
Google.com has quietly improved its filetype: searches. Previously, it was looking (simply) for the part of a page URL that ends in the filetype: argument, and it can still do so: filetype:tonini (finds Facebook profiles in particular). However, for standard, common file types, Google now also searches for all files of a given kind (such as MS Excel), with a …
Google Introduces before: and after:
Google has just introduced two new search operators – before: and after: Here is what @searchliaison tells us: The before: & after: commands return documents before & after a date. You must provide year-month-day dates or only a year. You can combine both. For example: [avengers endgame before:2019] [avengers endgame after:2019-04-01] [avengers endgame after:2019-03-01 before:2019-03-05]. If you provide only …
Why Searching for URLs On Google Is a Thing To Do
One popular Sourcing “hacking” technique is by constructing or altering page URLs. Doing so can be useful when the site doesn’t have the search capabilities “officially” in its UI. This is the case with Facebook Graph Search, some LinkedIn “hack” searches, and more. How do we learn the way to construct the URLs, particularly search URLs, if they are not “official” …