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The Anatomy of a Search
A Boolean search string in a search engine has its structure. Its elements are: keywords, key phrases in quotation marks, operators (like site:), and special characters (like “*” in Google). Unfortunately, this structure has little to do with what we have in mind when we search; so the challenge is to translate our search for people with certain professional background into those cryptic-looking strings. To facilitate this translation, let’s think of the structure of our search this way:
1. What type of a document are we looking for? This could be: a resume, an online profile on a particular network, a list of people, someone’s contact info, or some other type of a page. To get to that type of results (perhaps risking some false positives but that’s OK) we could start the search string with:
- A resume: intitle:resume OR inurl:resume -jobs -job…
- An online profile (example): site:zoominfo.com/people…
- A list of people: filetype:xls name title company phone email…
- etc.
2. What kind of terminology are we looking for? These are your keywords, like Java, or C++, or SAP, etc.
3. What is the physical location? We add names of towns, area codes, zip codes, and other location pointers.
4. What are the target titles? Target companies? These seem straightforward.
5. What do we want to exclude? (Example: exclude “managers”) Use the minus to exclude words.
This doesn’t cover it all – but in many cases will help someone new to complex Boolean searching to get going. To construct your initial search just follow the structure: 1-2-3-4-5. Then (as always) alter the string depending on the results.
As an example, let’s search for resumes of Java developers in NYC from one of the large Wall Street companies. Let’s construct the search following the steps above; this is an example to illustrate the concept – and a fine search string to play with:
intitle:resume OR inurl:resume -jobs -job Java NYC OR 212 OR “new york” developer Bloomberg OR Goldman OR Morgan OR Merill -manager
That is my point for today. I am very interested to hear if it would help to create Boolean strings.
Numbers
This site went over 100K+ hits this week…
…which has prompted me to take a look at some other statistics. These nice numbers below show the growing importance of Sourcing and Internet research in our work.
I have created the sites below in the last two years:
http://booleanstrings.com – 100K hits
LinkedIn Group (very active!) Boolean Strings: 11,000+ members. New discussions daily. Big thanks to the active sourcing community for keeping this up and running!
Top companies:
- Google (138)
- Kforce Inc. (84)
- Microsoft (65)
- Oracle (59)
- Korn/Ferry Futurestep (43)
- SourceRight Solutions (41)
- Amazon.com (38)
- KPMG (34)
Top locations:
- United States (8042)
- San Francisco Bay Area (1106)
- India (865)
- Greater New York City Area (628)
- United Kingdom (605)
- Washington D.C. Metro Area (440)
- Greater Chicago Area (407)
- Greater Atlanta Area (403)
Social Network “Boolean Strings”: 3,900+ members. 800+ discussions. About 4K hits per month. Bi-weekly chats on Thursdays (the next one is next week). Once again, big thanks to the members for excellent contributions. We run sourcing contests here too.
67 countries represented:
- Afghanistan
- Aland Islands
- Albania
- Algeria
- American Samoa
- Australia
- Bahrain
- Belarus
- Belgium
- Bermuda
- Bosnia and Herzegovina
- Brazil
- Canada
- China, mainland
- Czech Republic
- Denmark
- Finland
- France
- Georgia
- Germany
- Hong Kong
- Hungary
- India
- Indonesia
- Ireland
- Israel
- Italy
- Japan
- Jordan
- Kenya
- Korea
- Kuwait
- Lebanon
- Malaysia
- Malta
- Mexico
- Myanmar
- Netherlands
- New Caledonia
- New Zealand
- Nigeria
- Norway
- Oman
- Pakistan
- Peru
- Philippines
- Poland
- Romania
- Russian Federation
- Saudi Arabia
- Singapore
- South Africa
- Spain
- Sweden
- Switzerland
- Thailand
- Tunisia
- Turkey
- Ukraine
- United Arab Emirates
- United Kingdom
- United States
- United States Minor Outlying Islands
- Venezuela
- Vietnam
- Virgin Islands, U.S.
- Yemen
New experimental sites
– 1,000+ searches daily.
Other LinkedIn Groups:
- Twitter for Sourcing and Recruiting: 11K+ members
- Social Media Recruiting (co-managing with Bill Boorman): 8.7K+ members
- Software Development Jobs (very active; ~50 posts per day): 14K+ members
- Management Consulting Jobs: 21K+ members
- 100K+ Jobs Only: 4K+ members
Here are some personal and business numbers:
- 18,900+ connections on LinkedIn
- 14K+ followers/included in 670+ lists on Twitter.
My agency Brain Gain Recruiting has been in business for 6+ years now. Both my partner Julia Tverskaya and I have won SourceCon challenges.
In the last two weeks we submitted 11 candidates (all in Software Engineering) of which 8 were intervied, 3 got and accepted offers.
What will the numbers be like in a year from now? 🙂
Finding Company Email Patterns
Given a company domain name company.com, and the first and the last name of a person, we can construct the address – if the company follows a certain pattern in email addresses (such as fist-dot-last-at-company.com). How can we find out what the pattern might be?
1. What NOT to do
Do NOT search on Google for
“*@company.com”
You may be lucky and find some email addresses. But you will be just as lucky (or unlucky) if you search, for example, for “*\company.com”. Both @ and \ are special characters and both are ignored. If you are in doubt, please compare the results of these searches:
- “*@company.com“
- “*@@@@@company.com”
- “*\company.com” (or try using any other special symbol instead of \)
- “*company.com”
2. Check these sites that publish collections of patterns (thanks to Gary for pointing these out):
These sites cover several thousand companies; hopefully, their coverage will grow.
Have access to Jigsaw or Zoominfo? Check a few individual addresses there and you will see what the pattern is like.
3. Google for emails of company employees by using the search string
“email * company.com” (plus some optional keywords)
and/or “email * * company.com” (I have added one more asterisk). Sometimes you will have to exclude addresses starting with “support”, “info”, or “sales” to get to “human’s” emails; we all know how to do that. It’s not necessary, however, to remove false positives if we see enough results to come to a conclusion.
Here’s a simple example:
If nothing can be found, you may want to find out whether the company website domain and the email domain differ and correct the search appropriately.
4. Verify
Sites like Mailtester.com work all in the same fashion, so it’s enough to just try one of them. They do work if the company mail server allows verification of individual emails. They don’t work if the server doesn’t allow that, or if there’s a catch-all email address, or if the server is down at the moment.
5. Cross-reference for verification
This method still works fine! You could use Facebook’s and many other sites’ “find friends” functions as well. To be found, of course, the person needs to be a member with the address registered.
(Cross-referencing via social media also provides a glance at the person’s profile and lets you verify if you do want to send that email.)
Find Everything Using Chrome
I find it a bit annoying when Google search decides to omit similar results – which it does most of the time! To control this behavior, we need to go to the last page with the results and click the link “repeat the search with the omitted results included”. There’s a shortcut to doing this, which is adding &filter=0 to your search URL that is still a distraction. There’s however an even nicer way to get there.
In Chrome, go to Options/Basic/Search Engines. Select “add a new search engine”. Put anything for its name, a short word like “all” in the second column and something like
{google:baseURL}search?q=%s&filter=0&num=100
in the third column.
From now on, if you type the word “all” as the first word, just before you type in your Boolean search string into the Chrome address bar, your search will display all results right away.
Taking this further, this technique allows us to create shortcuts to control any Google and Bing search options that previously couldn’t be expressed within the search strings and had to be set up in the “options” or in the “preferences”. Some examples for Google include date ranges, Image, Blog, Patent, and Google-plus searches.
Google – Yahoo/Bing Comparison Chart
Here is a chart outlining the “core” syntax elements that most of us use daily.
Why Search #LinkedIn from #Google?
The number of “search facets” on LinkedIn’s advanced people search dialog goes up with the level of the account. But even “LinkedIn Recruiter” subscribers – those who have the maximum search power within LinkedIn – can’t search for some profile data.
For data that can only be viewed by LinkedIn members, like files attached to profiles or a Twitter ID, we are all out of luck and can’t search for it, period. However, some of the non-searchable data is on the open web… and this provides the answer to the question #1 on the Sourcing Quiz:
Any profile data that:
- cannot be searched inside LinkedIn
- is available on the open web
can be searched using Google.
Here’s an example of a very useful search, locating profiles with a link to a resume (also suggested in a reply to the quiz):
site:www.linkedin.com “location * san francisco bay area” java sql “websites * * * resume”
Here are a few more examples.
We can search for people who have worked at their current job for 2-10 years:
site:www.linkedin.com java developer “location * san francisco bay area” “present 2..10 years” ,
people who have worked at two (or more) given companies:
people who stopped working in 2011:
There are some useful searches on Bing as well.
There’s more. Using Google’s asterisk in searching for phrases is one other area that we can explore (next time).
Of course, these searches will only find LinkedIn members with public profiles that show more than just the basic data.
Today’s Sourcing Contest/Quiz!
Announcing a Sourcing Contest/Quiz. (It’s not easy!)
Please post your answers as replies to this post.
Replying only to some questions, and replying several times is allowed. Repeating someone’s correct answer is fine but will score lower, unless you add some nice explanations or examples. (So the sooner you get some answers in, the more advantage you have!) Repeating an incorrect answer will give you disadvantage. You do not have to answer all questions to win; correct, well explained answers is what we’ll be looking for.
The winner will be announced next week.
The prize is either a 1 hour sourcing training with me, or two guest passes to future sourcing webinars (the winner’s choice). The winner will be featured on the Network.
Ready?
1. What profile information can you search for by X-raying LinkedIn on Google and cannot using LinkedIn people search (at any level of LinkedIn people search –including the advanced search on LinkedIn Recruiter)? Please give an example.
2. What search string would create different results on Yahoo and Bing (would do something useful in the yahoo.com search box and would not on bing.com)?
3. What % of posts on “open” groups on LinkedIn can be indexed by search engines?
4. What can you search for, using a Google custom search engine, that you cannot using the Google search? [Bonus: is there a way to search on Bing using a Google’s CSE?]
5. What are the differences between search results you get by X-raying Google-plus (site: site:plus.google.com <keywords>) and searching within Google-plus (on https://plus.google.com/ )?
6. If you searched on Google and it shows (about) 13,000 results found, what (if anything) can you conclude from that?
7. How is search on Google for “*@accenture.com” (plus some keywords) different from searching for “*\accenture.com” ? You can replace “Accenture” for a company name of your liking. Please explain and give an example.
8. How would you X-ray LinkedIn (on either Google or Bing) to find profiles of sales managers with MBA selling software, located near Chicago, who have a phone number mentioned in their profile?
9. Is it possible that a public LinkedIn profile would show more info than a profile viewed by a LinkedIn member who is logged in?
10. Take a look at the Google help page . What special character that used to be in Google’s cheat sheet is not listed anymore and why?
11. If you have someone’s profile on LinkedIn, what are some ways to find the person’s email address?
Boolean Strings for Beginners (Webinar)
The class is for those who search for people (candidates, business connections) on the Internet.
Who would benefit: sourcers, recruiters, human resources professionals, hiring managers, sales, marketing, and business development professionals; all those who would like to experience less frustration and more satisfaction and fun while looking people up on the web.
Learn – or review – the basics of the Boolean search on the Internet:
• How to pick the right keywords and phrases
• How to add the most useful search engine operators and special characters
• What to do if you get no results, the wrong results, or too many results
• How to get the right results quickly and painlessly.
The webinar comes with the slides, the updated annotated “25 Boolean Strings”, and one month of support over email, to encourage the participants to apply the skills in their daily work.
The webinar materials can serve as a basic reference guide for Boolean searches.
Outline:
o The Basics of the Boolean Syntax
o Creating and Modifying Search Strings
o Sourcing Methodology
o Q&A
How to Search for Google Plus Profiles
Searching for Google-plus profiles is no problem at all, whether you are already on Google-Plus or not. Here’s a direct link to a sample search:
Search for people on Google-Plus
– and please compare this with
See the difference? I have changed just one symbol in the search URL. The latter search returns both Google profiles and Google-plus profiles.
Unlike Google-profiles most Google-plus-profiles have a link to “send an email”. It’s a sourcer’s paradise!
The search for people returns up to 1,000 results. (I think they could do better here.)
We can also X-ray Google-Plus, but apparently Google has not indexed all Google profiles yet (ha!), so people search returns better results. Advanced search operators do work in the dialog. There’s one very subtle difference in the search results display: instead of “Google+” – which is the page title – they show “Google Profile“.
Note: You will not be able to find me on Google Plus (yet).