If you have a basic LinkedIn account, chances are that you keep running into those “private” and “out-of-network” profiles – as on the screenshot above – with no names, just the titles. We’ve discussed before that one can try and find the hidden name by pasting a sentence or two from the profile into Google with the hopes of finding the public profile of the mysterious person.

This works quite often, but not every time. Search engines may miss pages, miss keywords, and it takes some time for the engines to discover new results. Here is how to find the name of the person – without leaving LinkedIn. This should work for true “private” profiles as well – those that are visible only for LinkedIn members.

Step 1. Click on the nameless search results in LinkedIn and look at the URL; you will see the person’s LinkedIn ID “embedded” in it – it is a number (typically, large – close to 80 mln. for the people who joined recently). Copy the number.

Step 2. Click on this link. You don’t have to send me a message (please do, if you like, of course); the link is here for the purposes of our name discovery: Send me a message on LinkedIn

Step 3. Paste the number you have saved instead of my LinkedIn ID that you will see at the end of this link.

Et voilà…

Whenever you need to search for something it helps to imagine what you will see on the actual pages that the search engine will include in the results.

Let’s design Boolean strings to look for lists with email addresses and possibly phone numbers.

We would be looking for Excel or PDF files, or maybe CSV, or Doc, or html; thus, part of the string (on Google or Yahoo) would be filetype:xls OR filetype:PDF… It might be easier to review the results if we use a separate search string for each type.

We imagine that the lists we are going to find will have some or all of the words: name (possibly first, last), email (or e-mail), phone (or telephone, or contact), title, company. (Add or remove words to/from your search string depending on the results.)

If we are looking for lists with emails, we might imagine that some emails would be of a “public” type, so including gmail.com OR hotmail.com OR yahoo.com etc. may be a good idea.

If we have several target companies in mind and think we might locate a list of attendees, or members, or contarctors with representatives from those companies, we might look for, say, oracle.com OR cisco.com etc.

Similarly, if we know the target titles, we may try including them in the string, as an example, write mechanical OR electrical engineer OR consultant, etc.

We might also play with the idea that the pages to be found would have one of the words list, directory, attendees, participants, members, etc. either in the title or in the URL of the page. Trying these guesses separately might be helpful, not to clutter the search strings.

If it makes sensse to only look at recently published lists, that can be arranged on Google with the “options” (on the left).

Ready?

If you are just getting your feet wet with Boolean Strings search, there’s one easy way to get into deeper searching but keep a bit of the syntax (the site: operator) hidden, and move on when you feel more comfortable. I am talking about Google’s

Custom Search on the fly

You will still have to remember to use minus (-) as “NOT”, capitalize OR and don’t have to care about AND.

This link gives you access to using the most powerful Boolean operator: site: (or X-ray in recruiter speak) without actually typing it into the string.

Add a site to be searched to the “Custom Search on the fly” and you can search, for example:

• LinkedIn Profiles in the UK
• Resumes on Craigslist in NYC
• Spoke.com Directory
• Boolean Strings Network
• This Blog

…and many more places.

Boolean syntax is not hard but this might be a gentle first step into learning it.

Please read and comment here:

Trust and Privacy on LinkedIn