The 40+ Sourcing Tools We Cannot Live Without

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We’ve had a great list of tools contributed by 80+ members of the Boolean Strings LinkedIn group to the question:

“What are the sourcing tools you can’t live without? Please list some favorites.” and another 30 or so on the Boolean Ning Network – http://booleanstrings.ning.com/forum/topics/what-are-the-sourcing-tools

I thought I’d list some of the tools I use daily, to add to the discussion. Of course, there’s some overlap with those listed already. I am only listing free tools here, or tools where there’s a nice free option. Here you go.

URL shortening

Storage and sharing

Browser Add-Ons (Chrome and FireFox)

  • Fastest Chrome
  • Fastest Fox
  • Clickable Links
  • iMacros

“Manage search engines” in Chrome

Parsing, Filtering, and Sorting

Search Engines

Custom Search Engines

Here are some CSE’s we’ve built:

People and Company search

Real Time Search

Past Search

Twitter

Job Sharing

And finally,

General Purpose (thanks to Martin Lee for contributing!)

  • Coffee Mug

Please let me know if I missed something really cool. Thanks!

Temporary Errors on #LinkedIn

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When I was a Software Engineer at a biotech company years ago, one day we got a new manager whose background was not software but Biology. She walked in and asked us: “So, when can we expect to have no software bugs in the application you guys are building?”

Are you kidding? Anybody who deals with building software systems knows that some bugs are always there. Modern software is interactive and takes in a variety of data. It’s virtually impossible to test all possible user actions on any data set and any supported software platform. However, since the old days, the Quality Assurance field has also gathered clever tools that can automate testing and can provide collaboration between test engineers and developers. By all means it’s possible to clean up any commercial system to the extent where bugs are rare exceptions.

We use LinkedIn daily. It’s the professional network with wonderful features, the largest self-entered set of data on professional people, and friendly, safe environment to interact on business matters. Its code quality could be improved though. To explain what I mean I have pasted some images from my work last Friday.

(Don’t take me wrong, I love LinkedIn! I have a paid account and feel it’s money well spent. I just felt like complaining a bit, hoping that some QA folks will hear.) Here you go.

The Plus Came Back

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We have suspected that Google killed its Plus operator for a reason.

The Plus Came Back came back the very next day (almost), and in a very clever way:

  • When a search on Google starts with a + it will search those pages on Google+. This type of search is called Direct Connect; it doesn’t require crawling and is easy for Google to implement for the simple reason that Google hosts these pages itself.
Only a few of those searches work at the time of this post (like +google and +pepsi) but this is going to change soon!
Here are some consequences:
  • This is a serious threat for Twitter and for Facebook business pages.
  • Brand names become very important for all, much smaller players than Pepsi included. SEO converts into brand names competition.

Pretty interesting!

The Dream Software

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If I imagine the coolest piece of software for searching for candidates on the Internet, here’s what I would like to have available. (Please note, I said searching, not sourcing; sourcing has more to it.)

The Dream Software would search for “distributed profiles”. By a “distributed profile” I mean professional information about a person collected from many sources where she has some presence, such as the evidence of her skills, experience, location, current employer, certifications, education, contact info, or any other info.

Do you cross-reference? Picking a promising profile in one place and cross-referencing elsewhere (at least Googling!) is always a good idea, because we want to be both productive and considerate and only contact “the right” people. Now, imagine all that cross-referencing work done for us ahead of time! That would be dream come true.

My dream software would find talent using data distributed across many networks and sites, and only help validate the info. I would also be able to pick the easiest way to contact the person. Say, I may find a super-C++ Engineer on his blog and send him a message on LinkedIn, where his profile has very little info besides the title and the company (and where I’d never find him by keyword searching). If the software also knew about my memberships and highlighted the links where I can easily send an introductory message… that’s probably too much to ask at this point.

It’s a hard task to design and develop this software. Here are the two major challenges, as I see them.

1. Developers have to choose between crawling the web and sending queries to sites and networks and cross-referencing on the fly. Crawling is gradual due to the vastness of info and expensive due to storage needs; sending queries is limited and slow.

2. Gluing together pieces of a distributed profile is always a challenge if the person’s name is not unique. An easy way to identify two profiles as belonging to the same person is an email address, but this doesn’t scale well.

At this point I know of  two packages (both paid, am not affiliated) that do things along these “dream” lines; each chose to crawl the web:


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

— I’ll write in some detail about each in the upcoming posts. I would be very interested in hearing from you if you are a user of either, or if you know of another piece of a dream software.

Google Basic Syntax Chart

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Notes:

  • These are the core operators and symbols. This is plenty to masterfully search and source on Google; the rest is practice, art, and experimentation, I think 🙂  (Please let me know if you feel you’d like to add another operator or a symbol to this).
  • The list reflects the most recent changes in Google’s Boolean syntax.
  • Do not use AND in your searches. AND is implied, has long been gone from Google’s help pages, and using it may result is odd results shown.

#Google is Out of Control

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As the time goes, Google search takes more and more control over. What I mean is that it makes its best guesses as to what we “really” want to see in the search results. I agree that cleverly delivered interpretation of search requests benefits unsophisticated users.

Unfortunately, those of us who use advanced Boolean searches (a very small % of total population, of course) have to jump through hoops if we try to search for what we want, not for what Google thinks we may want.

Here’s who Google’s updated help page reflects this direction: ” Search engines use a variety of techniques to imitate how people think and to approximate their behavior…Synonyms might replace some words in your original query…A particular word might not appear on a page in your results if there is sufficient other evidence that the page is relevant. “

As part of this tendency, The PLUS Operator Has Been Replaced. This was an announced change and got some bitter comments on the web. A change that went almost unnoticed was the removal of the operator ~ (tilde) from Google help pages. It’s not very clear now how ~ works, since Google supposedly brings synonyms without being asked.

Are there any good news here? Sure – for those who like challenges! We now need to be even more insightful, creative, and posses stronger Boolean string knowledge to keep control in our own hands.

By the way – can you guess that happens as of today if you put Google+ in your search string?

Webinar: Google-Based Sourcing

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Join us for a Webinar on November 3

Space is limited.

Reserve your Webinar seat now at: [webinar is over. The materials are available here on the Downloads page.

Google remains the Tsar of search engines and a must-know-well for recruiters – or anyone who wants to search the Internet for professional information on people and companies. The advancement of online social “hangouts” has made Google even more critical to master. While it’s usually not necessary to use all of the advanced syntax, there’s a core set of Google Boolean operators and syntax rules that we need to use daily to be competitive and successful.

Did you know that the operator “plus” stopped working on Google just a few days ago? There are several more changes we need to be aware of.

Come join me for a detailed overview of the Google Search Engine, including the basics, intermediate and advanced tips and tricks, and a review of new and unannounced changes.

Who would benefit: sourcers, recruiters, HR, hiring managers, business development, marketing, sales managers, search enthusiasts, and anyone who wants to go beyond searching for a keyword or two and controlling the list of search results. A basic ability to search on Google is recommended for participants.

Here’s a brief outline:

  • Key Points to Using Google Search
  • Google Rules
  • — Boolean Syntax
  • — Operators, Special Characters, and Options
  • — PLUS No More: Recent Changes in Google’s Syntax
  • — The “Options”
  • Google Hacks
  • — Creative Use of Special Characters
  • — Finding Email Addresses
  • — Using the Date Range
  • — Targeting Geography
  • — Finding Lists and Directories
  • — X-raying Membership Sites
  • Coping with Captchas
  • Sourcing on Google-Plus
  • Custom Search Engine Basics
  • Productivity Techniques
  • Resources

Hope to “see” you there!

  • Date: Friday October 28
  • Time: 10 AM PDT/1 PM EDT
  • Length: 90 minutes
  • Price: $79 includes the slides, a video recording, and one month of support

(Please wait 10 seconds and you should be redirected to the payment page.)

Can’t make it live? No problem! I will provide the slides, a video recording, and support.

The PLUS Operator Has Been Replaced

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Google

This seems like a big piece of news.

When you try to use the operator + (meaning, give me the exact term), you now get this message:

The + operator has been replaced. To search for an exact word or phrase, use double quotation marks

The help page reflects the changes.

It has been somewhat awkward that Google introduced Google-Plus and their PLUS operator meant something different. (Can we expect the PLUS to come back as an operator to search Google-Plus? That would be nice.)

For now, this creates a bit of inconvenience for us. We can use quotation marks around a word but that’s more typing.

In the cases where we misspell a word – or search for a word that is rare but spells like a well known word – we can expect Google to inform  us of searches for the word variations. (Then it’s another click if you did mean to misspell it.) In most cases Google now not only varies the word (“auto-stemming“) but in fact goes for synonyms without us asking for that with the ~ operator (also gone from the list!). So now we can only control the search for a particular word with the quotation marks. As a slow typer, I don’t like that.

This also throws off lots of documentation, tutorials and help pages – including mine. As I think of it, it probably invalidates some software, generating dynamic queries, and some custom search engines as well.

On a more technical note, you can still add “&nfpr=1“ to the end of your search query’s URL to prevent Google from second-guessing.

Custom Search Engine: Hidden Profiles

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hidden profiles

Here’s a Custom Search Engine I have created, “Hidden Profiles”. This search engine has become popular due to appearing up high for a Google search for “hidden profiles.”

The Custom Search Engine looks for profiles across many different sites and has refinements for several social networks. Please check it out and let me know what you think.

Another Custom Search Engine: Person Search by Name (find other profiles!)

Blekko /people

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My business partner Julia Tverskaya and I had the pleasure of chatting with the CTO of Blekko Greg Lindahl at Sourcecon last week. Greg’s presentation was the one that we both enjoyed the most!

Why should sourcers check out Blekko? Here are some reasons.

Blekko is a search engine that has made creating custom search engines its major feature. They are called “slashtags“. People can influence what is found; this is democracy applied to search engines.

Blekko doesn’t show junk search results, including – what I especially appreciate – dynamically generated pages that are pages of results of a search query on some sort of site aggregating and selling information. (Many of us are tired seeing “Email, address, phone numbers, everything!” in search results for people on Google.)

Among slashtags already created is “/people”. It points to pages that contain online profiles and bios. For those of us who source for software engineers they also have a wealth of slashtags poinitng to all sorts of software development technologies. I’ve asked Greg if it would be possible to have a slashtag for pages with contact info and he said not yet, but it’s possible to create one.

The drawback right now is the small number of pages indexed, compared to search giants. This may be temporary; the company is small, too, and has good chances to expand coverage in the future.