It never gets boring in our profession! Ways to search online change all the time. Here’s a quick outline of some changes that happened this year in searching on the four major Social Networks – LinkedIn, Twitter, Google-Plus, and Facebook.

On LinkedIn, changes usually appear unannounced; overnight we are switched to new UI and different (usually, more restricted) ways to search. To create even more confusion, LinkedIn changes are being gradually rolled out to members, so it’s hard for us to compare notes. A recent example of such a change is the LinkedIn Group member search – it was gone as part of the recent Group redesign and is coming back in a restricted fashion: we will be able to search for Group member names only.

Google is now indexing Twitter. However, the top Twitter search service Topsy, the only service that indexed every Tweet “from the beginning of times”, was just abruptly shut down.

The recent Google-Plus UI redesign has stripped down its (weak, anyway) search for people by school and company functionality. Google-Plus has “tuned down” some of its features, such as Circles – they still exist, but are barely available via the new UI. There’s a “back to classic G+” link that allows to reverse the changes when you are logged in, but obviously, not for too long.

The Facebook Graph search still exists in the back end software code, but was officially removed from the home page search box about a year ago. Keyword searching in the text box on home page is no longer a productive way to run advanced searches. Sourcers use tools that provide back-door access to the Graph search, like Shane McCuscker’s and Michael Buzzel’s.

Hmm… this all sounds rather grim. There is a number of newer search/sourcing tools that I will describe in a future post. But it does feel like our industry needs new, better software tools. Hopefully, we will see some in 2016!

Here is something I can predict for the upcoming year – see the next post, Change Your Search Strings for 2016.

>>> Keep up-to-date, search deeper, and be more productive in 2016 by pre-ordering the upcoming

“300 Best Boolean Strings”.

Feeling adventurous? Try yourself out in the 2015 End of the Year Contest and you may win the “300 Strings”.

It has been seven years since the first Boolean Sourcing Contest (won by Andrea Mitchell). The ways search engines respond to queries have shifted since then. Boolean Search syntax has changed, but only sightly. However:

1) Google has become smarter, interpreting searches and looking for synonyms.

2) The amount of indexed data on the Internet has grown many times.

It has become harder to control Googling outcome. Sometimes it feels like, with the changes, advanced Internet search is becoming more of an Art than a Science.

In the just-announced End of the Year Boolean Sourcing Contest, I have included some tricky questions, which should be fun to solve for all those who like to search. Hope you enjoy them (and learn something new too)!

It’s also a good moment to reflect how the technology is evolving. We need to be adjusting our research methods to reflect the Internet search “reality” and use the most efficient and up-to-date searching methods.

Three winners of the Contest will receive my upcoming publication “300 Best Boolean Strings” and will be featured on this blog and on our Boolean Sourcing groups.

Ready?

Enter to Win “300 Best Boolean Strings”  –>

HERE

If you are a Recruiter and have listed your job openings within your LinkedIn profile, chances are, sometimes you receive messages offering a job as a JavaScript programmer or a SAP consultant. Annoying! That happens because you have those keywords on the profile; someone found you in search and forgot to review your profile. It’s NOT a good practice sending messaging to people who are not qualified. However, they will not have found you in the first place if they could search for JavaScript and SAP as skills, not just keywords.

A Skill search within the people search dialog would have made searching easier and would eliminate at least some poorly targeted messages. (Why isn’t it there??)

Recently – finally! – LinkedIn Recruiter accounts got skills search, as part of the Next-generation Recruiter. With a Recruiter subscription, we can select skills and and look for profiles with one or more of the selected skills. (There’s still no way to search for skill1 AND skill2 etc.)

Here is an example. In Recruiter, select major = computer Science, location = San Francisco Bay Area, company = Google OR Apple OR Facebook OR Yahoo OR LinkedIn OR IBM – and see the Skill selection:

It’s little known, but we have been able to search by skill from a personal account for a while now -not in the main search dialog, but in the “Field of Study Explorer“.

If we know what college major we are looking for in our prospects, we can change it and search for skills.

Try the same search as above using your personal account – major = computer Science, location = San Francisco Bay Area, company = Google OR Apple OR Facebook OR Yahoo OR LinkedIn OR IBM.

(Note: To do so, you will need some sort of a premium personal account; unfortunately, it seems, the skill selection is no longer displayed when searching in the Field of Study Explorer from a basic account. I don’t think it’s documented).

Here’s what searching for skills from a personal account using the Field of Study Explorer looks like:

Just as in Recruiter, this is an OR search for skills. As an example, you can search for skills= Python OR Perl OR PHP.

If you’d like to get more people with all of the skills (vs. one of those), you can add the skills in the keyword section: skills= Python OR Perl OR PHP, keywords = Python, Perl, PHP

Conclusion: Got a college major, will search by skills.

Want to figure out other productive ways to search? Sign up for the last webinar in 2015 – Boolean Search on LinkedIn – December 16, Wed, 2015, with an optional Practice hands-on session on Thursday.

In this post, I will explain how to locate the correct work email address in the case when a company uses a pattern including the middle initial (e.g. [email protected]). As an example, ConocoPhillips and JPMorgan use that format. Middle initials are often hidden from public profiles, and it is not always easy to look them up.

Just to mention a quick way to Google for email addresses that use the middle initial. Use this type of search – put the asterisk instead of the unknown initial:

• “ed.*[email protected]”
• “anne.*[email protected]”

If Googling doesn’t bring results, here’s a way that takes a bit longer.  This method can also be used to find the correct email address for anyone, starting with of a list of email permutations.

First, generate a list of variations (permutations) of the address. Here is a quick example – a list of email variations in an Excel file. You can also use any existing email permutator.

Next, populate a Yahoo-CSV-formatted file with the list.

Import the file it to your LinkedIn Contacts (scroll down to this icon):

Shortly after uploading, here is what you will see in the “Contacts” sorted by “new”. (I am using the example Yahoo CSV list):

Looking at this list of contacts – it’s pretty clear what the correct address is. Right? (You can download the example CSV file and try yourself).

That’s it, folks!

If you would like to learn a variety of efficient tools and tips for looking up contact information, sign up for our Interactive Workshop How To Find Contact Info; today’s session was sold out, and the next is on is January 5, 2016.

I am excited to announce the upcoming release of the “300 Best Boolean Strings”. It has been in the works for the last two years, as I have been saving my searches created during sourcing projects, in response to our student’s questions, and to demonstrate various search hacks in webinars.

“300 Best Boolean Strings” is an e-book with a collection of over three hundred best Boolean search strings and templates, along with explanations, and detailed, up-to-date search tip sheets.

I have included strings for X-Raying data-rich sites and Social Networks, sourcing for professional profiles, lists with contact information, data verification… you name it! The 300 Strings cover advanced search on Google, other search engines, and major Social Networks, for a large variety of industries, positions, and locations. Another part of the publication is a Mega Tip Sheet with the latest Boolean search syntax. Finally, I have included search strings that for using in conjunction with over twenty Custom Search Engines that I have constructed.

“300 best Boolean Strings” can serve as a tutorial, a sourcing tool, and a reference guide to advanced searching.

Release Date: the publication will be available by mid-January 2016.

Interested? Pre-order “300 Strings” at the introductory price of only $49

In a recent post, I have described a great productivity tool, Talent Pipeline, available to those who have a LinkedIn Recruiter subscription.

It’s little-known, but those without a Recruiter subscription can use LinkedIn functionality similar to Talent Pipeline. It is available from any personal account, Basic and Business alike. Just like with the Recruiter Pipeline tool, you can upload a list of email addresses and search within the profiles identified as belonging to LinkedIn members.

To take advantage of this function, first, paste the collected email addresses into a Yahoo-CSV-formatted file. Upload the file using the Yahoo-CSV upload button at the bottom of the page in LinkedIn Contacts:

It takes a bit of time to sync the profiles with the email list. When LinkedIn finishes uploading, you will see the list of identified profiles. It would look like this:

The purple Yahoo logo on the right shows the “source” for contacts; the grayed-out LinkedIn logo points to identified profiles that are not your connections.

You can then review the uploaded profiles. Here is a link to the profiles imported from a Yahoo CSV format, sorted by “new”. It will work for you shortly after you upload the file. You can now review the list and contact those members whose profiles look promising. Since the profiles already contain contact information, there’s a choice of an InMail and an email for reaching out. Uploading emails, identifying members, with an ability to message comes pretty close to similar functionality in the Pipeline tool! Try it out and let me know how it works for you.

-Irina

P.S. If you’d also like to search within the uploaded data vs. reviewing it, it’s not straightforward. The current search functionality in the Contacts doesn’t allow to combine search by several facets. We can’t search for a company, title, and location at the same time. (There is an unofficial link that will still allow to do advanced searches.)

To catch up on a variety of ways to source LinkedIn, including detailed explanations and examples of working this little-known yet very useful functionality, sign up for our webinar – Maximize ROI on Linkedin (last chance this year!) – Wednesday, November 18, with an optional practice on Thursday, November 19. (I will share the advanced search link at the webinar as well.) Seating is limited.

Recruiters like very long Boolean search strings. Why? It seems that the more synonyms and keyword variations you include, in long OR statements, the better control you get over the results and the more relevant results you will find. It’s common to run searches on Google that push the 32 keywords limit.

The truth is, this approach used to work well, but no longer does. Simple searches (and varied simple searches, run one after another) do better than searches with long OR statements.

Let’s take a look at a simple example and compare the search results for a string that spells out synonyms vs. a string that doesn’t.

Long Boolean String: resume filetype:PDF (CPA OR “certified public accountant”) (PwC OR PricewaterhouseCoopers) tax houston

Short Boolean String: resume filetype:PDF CPA PwC tax houston

Here’s what the searches look like:

In theory, the string with OR’s (the one on the left) should provide more results, but obviously, this theory is outdated!

In many cases, there’s no need to include OR statements in Google searches because Google knows about synonyms and keyword variations and will include them automatically. If you search for CPA, it will also search for “certified public accountant”. Remembering that would allow to shrink many favorite saved and reused strings to fewer keywords (and better readability).

Not only including long OR statements doesn’t help, because Google would search for synonyms anyway, it may hurt the search. It seems that Google is increasingly “disliking” complex searches and does less than stellar job providing relevant search results. You can think about it this way: when we give Google the space to make sense of the query (vs. controlling the query with overly complex syntax), Google works harder.

I will go into a deeper exploration of the matter in a future post; here’s just one observation regarding the numbers of results. As we know, Google never provides over 1,000 results and usually caps the number of results at a lower number; it would show 600 or even 300 results and stop there. For longer, complex search strings Google often decides to stop at a smaller number of results. You think you are covering every keyword possibility and should be getting more results, but you are getting fewer results instead. (Oh, and getting more captchas, too…)

No question about it, Google Boolean search can produce fantastic search results; it’s just that the search style we use needs to be different than ten years ago.

I am about to describe ways to search the Internet that you likely have never used. Please be patient; I need to start with some background, to explain how this works. Read on.

There is a difference we face in searching within a database vs. searching the Internet. In a database, we access structured data, i.e. records with predefined fields, and can do a faceted search. As an example, in the LinkedIn advanced people search, we can search for the name, title, company, and location. Web pages, on the other hand, have titles, URLs, content – and not much else (or so it seems!). A web page content is unstructured data, and it’s much harder to search.  Those of us, who are familiar with advanced search syntax, create Boolean Strings based on web pages’ patterns, to try and find specific kinds of data within the pages.

As an example, we use advanced search syntax or Custom Search Engines to Google for LinkedIn profiles. That searching approach is based on the profiles’ URL structure and helps to see only profiles in the results. Then, to narrow down to job titles, companies, and locations, we use additional advanced search syntax, and often with only so much precision.

Most web pages have no structure to rely on for searching. However, many sites and pages – LinkedIn public profiles included – do have some structured data that is hidden from the viewer but is “seen” and collected by Googlebot. To view that hidden structured data of a page, paste the page URL into Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. Take a look at various Social Network profiles in the Tool and you will see varying amounts of hidden structured data in public profiles – on LinkedIn, Google-Plus (of course!), Meetup, Github, and many other sites. Some hidden structured data follows the standard in Schema.org; some sites use other more-or-less standard ways to name data and the fields.

Google takes advantage of the hidden structured data, which it collects, by giving us rich previews (“snippets”) of search results. As an example, if we Google for LinkedIn profiles, previews will display taglines and locations underneath the profile links – those two pieces of information are that kind of data: