Did You Know? Ten Google Tips for #OSINT Research

booleanstringsBoolean, Google, OSINT 1 Comment

  Here are ten less-known facts about Google search. (How many of these are you aware of? There are some subtleties there.) You can restrict page dates either by selecting them under “Tools” after searching or using the operators before: and after:. However, you will be missing the pages that did not clearly tell Googlebot about their dates. Lots of …

How to Exceed 1,000 Search Results on Bing

booleanstringsBoolean, OSINT Leave a Comment

Guest post by Glenn Gutmacher In a recent post, Irina described an intriguing follow-up to a discovery made by Dan Russell. In short, the initial discovery was that Google used a completely different index to store its web-crawled image results from its index of regular webpages. What Irina realized is that the same query run on Google Images could yield …

Five Tools to Scrape Search Results

booleanstringsBoolean Leave a Comment

When you X-Ray on Google or search on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Github (etc.), you see results that are links with previews (called “snippets” in Google). The problem is that snippets never provide enough information to qualify a result. You can try very hard to phrase your search yet you should always expect false positives. It is time-consuming to click and …

Search for Women in Your Industry: 5 Tips and a Bonus

booleanstringsBoolean, Diversity 2 Comments

I live in a very diverse area (and love it). Let me demonstrate what it is like in the streets and parks, when people are out, by showing a screenshot for local Python Developers (no diversity filters applied): However – search for CEOs in the same area and you will see a very different picture: (A stunning difference, isn’t it?) …

Hack: Search for Female Names with This CSE

booleanstringsBoolean, Diversity, Hack 1 Comment

Are you searching for diversity? Using the same “synonyms” trick as described in Hack: Use 500 Keywords, Not 32, on Google, I have created a Custom Search Engine that looks for the 50 most popular women’s names. Add location, title, or skills, and you will get a list of women’s LinkedIn profiles with the required qualities. Example search: python developer bay …

How to Search for Bios on Github

booleanstringsBoolean 1 Comment

  Just like we can’t search for LinkedIn headlines within LinkedIn or by X-Raying, we can’t search for Github Bios – either within Github or by X-Raying. However, we can search for LinkedIn headlines with Custom Search Engines (CSEs). It turns out that we similarly can search for Github Bios with CSEs! We will be searching using Github X-Ray CSE. …

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 …

How to Do Executive Job Title Research

booleanstringsBoolean, Diversity Leave a Comment

Often, especially when sourcing for executives, we need to answer questions like these): What are possible job titles at a particular level of seniority, in a given industry (or at a company), with given functions? Equipped with this intelligence, we can start constructing filtered people searches. Without this research upfront, we would be encountering both false positives and false negatives …

Update on LinkedIn People Search

booleanstringsBoolean, LinkedIn 1 Comment

What happened? As of two days ago, search operators (that I have covered in previous posts) have stopped working on LinkedIn. This includes not only undocumented operators like headline: but also the officially documented operators firstname:, lastname:, title:, company:, and school:. (They were introduced in 2017). It’s quite unfortunate! [Edited April 22, 2019: LinkedIn has taken down that help page.] …

Automated Search? Not Any Time Soon

booleanstringsBoolean 9 Comments

Last week at the Sourcing Summit UK (a wonderful, content-rich event that I loved being part of), Karen Azulai predicted that hands-on search is going away. (I know that Karen is an expert in HRTech and her point of view is well backed-up with her knowledge.) Johnny Campbell presented an interesting overview of the dynamics of Sourcing over the years and shared some …