Google’s Hidden Gigantic Visual Repository

booleanstringsBoolean, Google, OSINT 2 Comments

As I was reading through Searching for images with filetype: on Google? by Dan Russell of Google, I was not that surprised that filetype: takes different arguments and finds different things on Google.com and image search. I had seen this behavior. But this was stunning: “to find an image, you have to use Images.Google.com. “ Dan’s post implied that Google’s index …

The Full List of 21 Google Search Operators

booleanstringsBoolean, Google 10 Comments

Operator Meaning Pages containing keywords in: allinurl: / inurl: – the URL allintitle: / intitle: – the Title allintext: / intext: – the text allinanchor: / inanchor: – the anchor text filetype: – file types site: Narrow results to a site related: Shows similar sites (being phased out) cache: Shows a page copy in the Index define Gives a definition …

Please Say No to OR on Google

booleanstringsBoolean, Google 3 Comments

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 Stop – it is an outdated, ten-year-old technique.”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

booleanstringsBoolean, Google 9 Comments

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

booleanstringsBoolean, Google, LinkedIn 2 Comments

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

booleanstringsBoolean, Google Leave a Comment

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

booleanstringsBoolean, Diversity, Google, Hack 4 Comments

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!)

booleanstringsBoolean, Google, OSINT Leave a Comment

  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

booleanstringsBoolean, Google 4 Comments

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

booleanstringsBoolean, Google Leave a Comment

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 …