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. 🙂

Do you know of all the ways to use Twitter? Let’s do a simple search and we will find out that…

• Twitter is a powerful tool for learning & sharing. …
• Twitter is a great tool for small business – especially restaurants…
• Twitter is a really great tool for finding business
• Twitter is a great tool for communicating with current and new users of your website
• Twitter is a fantastic aggregation tool for the wealth of content out there
• Twitter Is A Powerful Tool For Hypnotists
• Twitter is a great tool for marketers.
• Twitter is a fantastic tool for your IM business
• Twitter is a simple tool for communication and improving your social network, and for influencing people
• Twitter Is A Great Tool For Bloggers
• Twitter is a great tool for communicating. If a user is trying to get ‘paid’ results from it and not being successful, maybe they need to rethink …
• Twitter is a great tool for government transparency. I’m well aware politicians are regular human beings…
• Twitter is a fantastic tool for many things. You can use it to talk to your friends from work.
• Twitter is a fairly clunky tool for the delivery of customer service, …
• Twitter is a great tool for brand awareness and their interest is to use this to extend brand reach
• Twitter is a powerful tool for spammers because a single infected Twitter account could broadcast to tens of thousands of people
• Twitter is a great tool for direct marketing. The more followers you have, the more people who will be exposed to you product/message
• Twitter is a great tool for nonprofits. At the Genesis Network, we have been experimenting with new ways to utilize Twitter more effectively. …
• Twitter is a great tool for increasing your social media awareness on platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Linkedin, Myspace, etc.
• Twitter is a great tool for social bookmarking. …
• Twitter is simply a niche tool for communications junkies.
• Twitter is a good tool for getting your site indexed and ranked.
• Twitter is a revolutionary tool for businesses who are trying to create a community
• Twitter is a great tool for Museums to build communities around their brands online
• Twitter is a great tool for improving your writing by helping build buzz about yourself and forcing you to edit your work. 
• Twitter is a wonderful tool for self promotion.
• Twitter is a great tool for companies that want to engage in conversation with their current and potential customers.
• Twitter is a valuable tool for job-seekers. Most recruiters are on Twitter right now, so it’s important to start developing an online …
• Twitter is a priceless effective business tool for marketers, entrepreneurs, sales professionals, event planners, …
• Twitter is a great tool for research
• Twitter is a great tool for activists to network with other activists.
• Twitter is a great tool for following far away events (live) such as riots, revolutions & red carpet events.

There’s a lot more…

Here’s a LinkedIn  tip. If you copy a people search URL from a premium member and use it for a basic member, it will work just fine. Of course, you will need to decide whether you are up for using it or not.

Let me illustrate it. Compare the two sides of the screenshot below . They were both created using the URL http://bit.ly/dB7cqY (paste it in your browser).

On the left  side you see a piece of a premium holder search screen with some choices picked; on  right side you see a screen shot ot a basic user account with the exactly same premium (though visually disabled) options selected.

(Someone could probably create a table of substrings that need to be used in the URLs  per each premium field, per each of its  options. It looks pretty strightforward;  you need to add something  like

…keepFacets=keepFacets&page_num=1&facet_P=1&facet_SE=0+5&facet_F=5…

Twitter for Sourcing, Recruiting & Marketing – Thursday, June 24 – 1:00 PM ET

How do you find someone’s email address? Using the symbol @ in searches on Google is useless since it’s ignored along with most of the special characters. We know ways to figure out a company email pattern via clever Google searches using the asterisk * (ask Gary Cozin ).

Unfortunately, our methods may not work in some cases. Besides, some companies, even large ones, don’t have a consistent pattern.

Here’s how to see which one of your guesses about someone’s email address is correct – in case the person is a LinkedIn member.

1. Enter ALL of your guesses into a text or a CSV file.

2. Upload it to LinkedIn as “Imported contacts”. (Don’t invite anybody! This may not be a good idea.)

3. Check out your “Imported contacts”.  See which email was the right one?

(By the way I am happy to connect on LinkedIn; see my profile.)

žWhy we must use the Internet to source candidates:

• To use its vast resources and get ahead of the competition
• To find candidates that we would not find otherwise
• To communicate with potential candidates in a network context
• To cross-reference  prospects so that we are on the phone with the right people

Here is a cool blog post contest. Post a blog (anywhere) with an estimate of the number of resumes on the Internet and win a ticket to #TRUsource in Atlanta.

Please email Geoff Webb at [email protected] with a reference to your post; please also share on the Boolean Strings network.

Also, to help get this off the ground, I am offering my Google-Based sourcing DVD to a randomly selected person out of the first five people who post.

Please feel free to post your answers here as comments on the Boolean Strings Network.

I looked around this morning and here are some interesting numbers I was able to pick:

* With more than 35 million resumes dispersed over 40000 Web-based locations, recruiters and hiring managers are spending more than 65% of their time …

* Some experts say that there are now over 16 million resumes floating around the Internet. Monster.com, the largest online job board, has more than 20 …

* With Over 52 Million Resumes Floating Over The Internet Everyday,. How Will You Find Just One?…

* There are an estimated 100+ million resumes posted on the Internet. TalentHook allows you…

* There are over three million resumes on the larger internet sites. Thus, it is important to breakthrough the “clutter”…

* The Toolkit also includes our Search the Web feature, which provides access to over 7 million resumes posted on the internet.

* With an estimated 100 million resumes posted on the internet, rest assure that your next great hire can be found online. So stop paying huge recruiting …

* There are nearly 15 million resumes on the Internet today. Most are located on fee-based job boards, many of which cost thousands of dollars to purchase. …

* Is my resume really getting seen in a pile of 40 million other resumes on the internet? I have excellent skills and qualifications, but will anyone find me …

Have fun with the contest!

Irina

For many of us, Deep Web means pages that Google – or any other search engine – can’t find. This is almost true, but not exactly true.

Deep web consists of  dynamic links, password-protected sites, pages with no links leading to them, and a few other kinds of “hidden” pages. It turns out (and you may have experienced that) that we see some dynamically-generated paged in out searches on Google. Here is an example that I got while searching for resume, Java, and Swing.

How does this happen? The underlying mechanism is that Google finds “promising” sites with forms and tries to generate pages by “throwing” some keywords to fill those forms. If the resulting pages seem to be “interesting” to Google’s algorithm, Google includes them among the static results.

If you know to to build Google’s custom search engines, you can control Google and only show the deep web results. This is because, unlike standard Google search, custom search accepts special characters such as the question mark.

Both special characters in custom search engine templates and deep web results among other results are cool Google features. I plan to post about Custom Search Engines in more detail soon.

Many of us X-ray LinkedIn from Google. If we are looking for profiles with certain keywords, we use the string

site:linkedin.com inurl:in OR inurl:pub -inurl:dir -inurl:jobs <your keywords here> …

Strangely though, Google forgets to add many words that belong to all LinkedIn profiles as keywords. If you search for “Public profile powered by”, industry, connections, current, past, etc., Google will miss many relevant results. It might be interesting, say, to look for people with few connections using the num-range expression  “1..10 connections”; alas, the majority of the results will be missed.

Yahoo does a better job at this; keep in mind though that the Yahoo search engine (initially created by folks at Inktomi) is going away by the end of 2010.

If a LinkedIn member wishes not to have a public profile, LinkedIn promptly removes the info from the Web. However, did you know that what you see marked as private profiles in search results has nothing to do with personal privacy settings? The majority of LinkedIn profiles are public and can be viewed – without upgrading your account. Come to my webinar to get an in-depth look at searching and viewing LinkedIn profiles and contacting prospects on LinkedIn.

Space is limited.

Link to register: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/639581618

Content:

* Exploring Private Profiles
* Getting Info on Out-of-Network Profiles
* How to Find More than 100 Members in a Search
* Which Profile Info Can and Cannot Be Found
– LinkedIn Search
– Web Search
* Advanced People Search Dialog Tips
* Selecting Target Lists of Connections
* Email Addresses for LinkedIn Members
– Finding
– Verifying
* Cross-referencing Using LinkedIn
* Discovering LinkedIn Profiles on Blogs and Twitter
* Custom Search Engines for LinkedIn
* Resources

As the results of the webinar you will get to the next level in your ability to quickly and easily find the right people on LinkedIn, and make the right choices about upgrading your account.The webinar will be of practical use for recruiters, sourcers, sales, marketing people, and anybody else who would like to find business prospects on LinkedIn. Lecture, demonstration, and Q&A will be included in the presentation. You need to have at least some basic search skills for LinkedIn and for Google to benefit.

Date/time: Tuesday, June 8th, 9 am PDT/noon EDT
Length: 90 min
Price: $79
As always, my webinars come with one month of Q&A over email.