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

LinkedIn Groups was a great invention and, I think, remains the best way to source on LinkedIn. A member can belong to up to 50 groups, send messages within the group for free and post jobs for free.

The groups are undergoing a major redesign where the News are now blended with Discussions. You also see a moving row of posts with images and can vote on the posts you like. At the moment of this writing – July 9,2010 – some groups are keeping the old user interface and some have moved to the new user interface.

Another major change is that now you can’t include a group membership in your people search if you are not a paying member. The pay for searches that include groups is quite high.

It’s useful to narrow down on group members! Do you have to upgrade now? Here are some points to review, before you do.

1. You can search members within a group and get up to 500 results even if you are a basic member:

2. You can narrow down your advanced people search to only members of the groups you belong to. In the results, you will see which groups those are. You will be able to send a message to each person in the results list:

3. You can use X-Ray. This is how you can find people belonging to a group on Google:
SAP “Twitter for Sourcing and Recruiting ” site:linkedin.com
(replace “SAP” for your own keywords).

It’s interesting to see what is the next feature to become paid on LinkedIn. What are your guesses?

This is a very important point for a sourcer or anybody who uses search engines.

Google, Yahoo, and Bing will never show more that 1,000 results per search.

Many of us know that, but with that comes the fact that an announced approximate numbers above 1,000 cannot be trusted.

Any “number of results” displayed by each of these search engines is just a wild guess, and the approximation that can be off by orders of magnitude . The engines are not trying to fool us and don’t claim the numbers have close relevance to the reality either.

Numbers of results, especially if there’s more than 1,000, change as you go through the pages of results, based on the search engine trying to make a better guess (try it).

It’s unfortunate, but we can never rely on the numbers that are over 1,000 for any conclusions. As an example, you cannot tell which of two search strings bring more results, or which of the two search engines found more results based on the numbers (if they are large). The only reliable numbers that we see are less than 1,000, and only with the “omitted results included”.

Note, that I am not even talking here about results that are relevant but have not been found.

Why wouldn’t the search engines display the correct numbers of results? The answer is simple. It is just not possible with the huge amount of info to go through, large – but still limited – storage and reasonable time frame to respond to our queries.

If you search, for example, on Google, you will find some interesting articles dedicated to the matter and also more than a thousand articles making mistakes on the number of results assumption.

Of course, this made our “how many resumes are there on the internet?” contest pretty difficult. 🙂