When Google feels like our queries are too complex and suspects that they are sent by a robot, it throws a captcha  (a squiggly word with a box below it). This supposedly protects Google from being misused by non-humans, i.e. computer programs, that may find and scrape too much information too quickly.

If you are a human presented with a captcha, Google recommends to take a few actions. Unfortunately, in practice, this doesn’t help a whole lot.

Here is what usually does help, at least makes things easier: cleaning cookies; using a different browser; rebooting your Internet connection; or simply waiting a few minutes. There’s no 100% solution that would stop the Google.com search from questioning our humanity once and forever. Filling out an occasional capture is no big deal.

Unfortunately, about 2 or 3 weeks ago, mid-November 2013, the Google capchas’ behavior towards humans has worsened. Not only they appear quickly and often for those of us who use advanced operators like inurl:, the asterisk, and the numrange. It has a new behavior. Filling out a captcha doesn’t let us see the results; instead we are sent back to the empty Google search. Thus any search activity is stalled for a while. These posts: on our LinkedIn group, on Twitter, and on the general Google search forum are just a few reports about this.

I experienced a captcha attack first-hand while preparing the fun “Boolean Solved” presentation.

So, while the anti-bot war is going on in unreasonable ways, here is a sure way to search like a person, not a bot: use Google custom search engines. Captchas seem to leave those alone. With this in mind, I have created the very simple “Search .com” search. Use the link – or search here:

Search .com Domains

I have also created just a slightly more complex custom search engine that searches across .com, .org, .edu and many more domains. Use this link: Google No-Captchas or access this CSE in the Search Engine list.

I am not quite ready to start using Bing as my default search engine…

The Skills page has been removed. But skills are present in LinkedIn, not just on members’ profiles but also on some other pages. That could be useful for sourcing.

Company pages may list skills that their employees have, even along with the numbers of people with a particular skill.

University pages show skill that their University grads have:

This is shown on the second page, which is often missed; you can get there simply by clicking on the arrow icon on the Alumni search page.

You can also find the list of “suggested” skills by using this (secret) link. (Replace “a” with any letter you like). On this blog the author has tried to list all the skills on LinkedIn using the link; it turns out, there’s about 50K skills. Unfortunately, the skills suggested when you use the link are not related to any “target” profile; these are the skills that show up when you try to write an endorsement for a fellow member.

There have been complaints that the former Skills page offered a great opportunity to search for relevant skills. I have seen multiple blog posts and  questions on groups. on how to “get there” now that the skills page is gone; here are some: LinkedIn Skills Alternatives (oh yeah, it’s now “turned off”, sorry.) ; Finding Keywords for Recruiters ; Sourcing for Synonyms: Alternatives to the LinkedIn Skills Tool;

However, we still can find relevant skills using LinkedIn. Here are some examples of relevant skills lists that I got this morning, using a basic account (the bolded term is to what I am listing related skills):

Financial Analysis: Financial Modeling, Finance, Microsoft Excel, Financial Reporting, Forecasting, Budgets, Portfolio Management, Investments, Risk Management, Accounting, Analysis, Corporate Finance, Strategic Financial Planning, Banking, Strategic Planning, Valuation, Microsoft Office, Process Improvement, Credit, PowerPoint, Credit Analysis, Loans, Mergers & Acquisitions

Java: JavaScript, SQL, C++, XML, Linux, HTML, MySQL, C#, C, Agile Methodologies, Microsoft SQL Server, Python, CSS, Eclipse, Databases, Unix, Software Engineering, Web Services, PHP, Perl, jQuery, Core Java, Java Enterprise Edition

Radiology:  Hospitals, Healthcare, Clinical Research, Healthcare Management, EMR, Patient Safety, Healthcare Information Technology, Medicine, Medical Imaging, BLS, PACS, Surgery, Inpatient, Pediatrics, HIPAA, Critical Care, Cpr Certified, Nursing, EHR, ACLS, Medical Education, Medical Terminology, Ultrasound 

You can do some research and find the way to do this (it’s not a technical “hack” at all, no special access to LinkedIn or special technical knowledge is necessary) – or attend my webinar on LinkedIn that I will be repeating on Thursday and learn how to do this, along with many other tips that I will be sharing. As always, the webinar comes with one month of support.

Due to the strong demand from those who missed it on November 8th, a special repeat live session of this webinar is scheduled for Thursday, November 21st!

LinkedIn doesn’t easily let you search beyond your network; it requests the searches to be narrowed down by keywords if you want to do that. The same is true for paid accounts, including Recruiter. However…

I was able to do a search (today, 11/15/2013) and see the LinkedIn member numbers by country for all the major countries, the ones with a code abbreviation.

Here are the results (and a screenshot below) –

–Irina

It was a pleasure delivering the free “Boolean Solved” webinar, sponsored by HiringSolved, yesterday. We had a huge number of people – 1,057 people signed up! – from 39 countries:

AE, AR, AU, BE, BR, BY, CA, CH, CN, CO, CZ, DE, DK, EC, ES, FR, GB, GH, HU, IE, IL, IN, IT, NL, PH, PK, PL, RO, RU, SA, SG, SZ, UA, UG, US, UZ, VN, YE, ZA.

Wow.

70% of people came from the US. Job titles ranged from Recruiter to VP of Talent.

The night before Google was not cooperating, throwing more captcha’s than usual. I got pretty nervous and prepared the demo search windows ahead of time. During the presentation I had to pick the right window out of about 40; managed OK, though a few more monitors would have been helpful. 🙂

Here is an example search from the webinar, where I was explaining how we should be searching for “what we expect to find”, or “how others would phrase what we want to find”, or simply, that it helps to

Visualize Success:

By the way, it is pretty easy, once you start thinking this way. Let me illustrate this. Suppose we are looking for a list of professionals with contact info. We are going to find people’s names, titles, email domains, etc.

Instead of:
lists of management consulting professionals

or, even, instead of:
list name title company phone management consultant

we would do better if think about what we are likely to find in a “good” result:

1. names; how about: Mary Pat John James
2. titles; like “Senior” manager… accountant… etc.
3. company names, like  deloitte accenture
4. phone numbers; how about area codes 913 OR 785 OR 620 OR 316 as an example.

Now, try these searches and you will see how much more successful the search gets:

Mary Pat John James deloitte accenture mckinsey senior 319 515 712

How about this:

“deloitte.com” “accenture.com” senior 319 515 712

Of course, these are only sample searches. Bu they do illustrate the concept very well.

P.S. Every Sourcer sourcer should also learn how to do a barrel roll.

Did you know that not all LinkedIn search fields accept Boolean AND-OR-NOT expressions and some have different syntax than searching by keywords? Understanding the correct syntax is critical is executing searches and interpreting the search results.

This is a quick overview of the variations in the supported search syntax in LinkedIn search dialogs. The three syntax variations are:

1. Boolean search, supporting AND (implied), OR, and NOT, quotation marks for phrases, and parentheses for grouping statements
2. Search based on typing in some characters that prompt for the possible variations to be displayed and selected: “prompt search”
3. Search by a sub-string (non-Boolean): “sub-string search”

The Advanced search offers Boolean search in the fields on the left and “prompt search” in some of the other text-based fields.

The advanced dialog gives us a choice of Boolean search and prompt-search for the company names.  Clearly, each way of searching has its advantages.

The Boolean search syntax on LinkedIn is documented in a LinkedIn Tip Sheet (nicely formatted but, unfortunately, with several syntax errors in it – try to find them!)

The Find Alumni dialog offers “prompt search” in the locations, companies, and a few more fields, and Boolean search in the keyword section:

The search in Contacts is by sub-strings: below, you can see that the search for “bu” brings up both “business” and “buyer” in the titles.

For the advanced LinkedIn user, here’s a tricky question: what would the search for “university OR college” in the name of a school locate? See the screenshot below:

Are you aware of all the differences and opportunities provided in LinkedIn search dialogs? Do you use X-raying in Google to complement your LinkedIn searches? Come to my webinar this coming Friday to get a comprehensive overview of all the searching capabilities and taking advantage of them in your search for targeted professionals.

The first person to email me the correct answer to the “tricky question” above (explain how you got the answer) will get a free pass to the webinar.

While Yahoo.com is considered to be one of the top sites that people access for web search, right behind Google and Bing, it has long lost its own search engine due to its business decisions, and has been “powered by Bing” since 2010. Since that switch, Yahoo has not provided any additional or different search results, compared to Bing.

What “powered by Bing” means in practice, is that:

1. Yahoo.com accepts your search terms
2. sends them to Bing
3. gets the search results from Bing
4. and displays the results.

Yahoo may “decide” to show the search results differently than Bing. Here’s an example where yahoo previews the info differently; in this case, it provides better previews and the photos of LinkedIn members.

While, in theory, the results should be the same, it looks as though, today, in many cases yahoo.com decides to provide its own search order. Take a look at the search below, that has exactly 5 results, and the search order is very different on Yahoo vs. Bing. I have added color lines to point to the same results on both pages. (What is going on here?)

Unfortunately, bing.com doesn’t have a good advanced search dialog available (vs. Google’s that has been of help to “beginners”). I used to recommend yahoo’s advanced search dialog to students, and it’s still out there but, please note, it seems broken, and is not linked to any more from the yahoo site.

Some other tests I’ve run seem to indicate that some of the advanced search syntax may not be processed in the way we expect it to on yahoo.com, which could simply point to yahoo.com not making maintaining advanced capabilities a priority.

The moral of the story is: If you have a habit of searching on yahoo, you may want to stop and verify your search results against searching on the “source” i.e. the bing site.

(Google search users, don’t forget that Bing has a somewhat different search syntax. Don’t forget your parentheses around the OR statements and a few other things.)