Is LinkedIn Actively Preventing Recruiters from Searching Profiles via Google?

Shally Steckerl, Executive Vice President, Arbita

Is LinkedIn Actively Preventing Recruiters from Searching Profiles via Google?

Recruiters often like to use the site: command on search engines to find LinkedIn profiles (a method we first described five years ago) because search engines avoid the 100 results per search limit imposed on queries done within LinkedIn’s own Advanced search (for free LinkedIn account users) and because they reveal unblended profiles of people outside your three-degree network (only LinkedIn corporate account holders can view virtually all users), especially handy when you’re sourcing in new areas where you don’t have a strong network.

Lately, however, there’s plenty of Web chatter about what recruiters perceive to be LinkedIn’s effort to block searches of public LinkedIn profiles using the site: command.  While these rumors have been around in different forms for many years, recent changes to LinkedIn’s website architecture seem to have strongly reinforced this perception.

Actually this couldn’t be farther from the truth.

The fact is that today it is even easier than ever to find people’s public LinkedIn profiles. Part of the reason for this rumor is that as recruiters we tend to overthink things, and suspect we are being actively blocked, because we are so accustomed to facing and overcoming obstacles.

With LinkedIn’s new top level domain structure, profiles from countries other than the US are extremely easy to identify, and you don’t even have to use much advanced syntax. For example, if you want Chartered Accountants (like a CPA) in the UK, all you need for a search engine string is:

site:uk.linkedin.com “chartered accountant”

Did you notice that your results are almost exclusively profiles?  That’s right:  no job postings, Answers pages, company info, or other distracting results, just good old profiles. Even better, you don’t need any complex logical disjunctions and nested Boolean syntax like (inurl:pub OR inurl:in). What if you want your Chartered Accountants in Canada? Just switch from site:uk.linkedin.com to site:ca.linkedin.com and voila!  This works for 97 different countries!

Unfortunately, this simple and elegant search won’t work for US profiles because all the Answers, Company Pages, Groups, Jobs, Events and other content published on LinkedIn resides under the root domain, linkedin.com, along with all the US profiles.

So what about all the complaints that the “usual” search strings no longer work? Rumor has it that LinkedIn has somehow changed their website structure to prevent using our familiar old “site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:directory -inurl:jobs” search string variations.

This rumor is also untrue.

LinkedIn is continuously experimenting with optimizing their indexing and improving search results. This is in everyone’s best interest and it is not being done to prevent us from finding public profiles but rather to speed up profile search. LinkedIn wants profiles to be publicly searchable, as this builds traffic to their website, which immensely benefits them.

In the past, with fewer profiles and less content on LinkedIn, we could just Google a few words and get results.  As a side effect of both LinkedIn’s search optimization efforts and the sheer volume of content, our searches must be very specific in order to get good results. There are now at least 135 million pages on the linkedin.com website which are accessible from search engine queries, but only about 25 million of those are profiles. This translates to roughly 30% of LinkedIn’s 76 million profiles, though in some industries and/or geographies, the percentage of public profiles is higher.

Our trusty old search strings don’t work so well simply because there’s too much content. Using “inurl:pub” brings back many irrelevant results with the word Pub in the name such as Pub Goers Inc, Kegler’s Pub & Pin, Pub Tours Party Bus, and so on. Therefore to use inurl:pub you must also use -intitle:pub so you can negate that effect. A similar thing happens when you use inurl:in in your search. So now the simple (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) becomes (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:pub -intitle:in. Wow. But it doesn’t even end there!

You may have seen some suggestions to utilize the negative search term -inurl:dir to tighten up your results. While that may be a somewhat adequate technique for now, adding more negative search terms (the – is the same as the AND NOT Boolean) is just too complicated to be a real long term solution to our search problem. Each time LinkedIn changes their directory structure with things like Directory and Recently Updated Profiles, or adds features like Jobs, Events, Answers, Groups, and Company Pages, we’ll have to invent some new negative search term to eliminate those non-profiles from our results. Then we end up with something that looks too much like rocket science:

(inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:pub -intitle:in -intitle:answers -intitle:updated -intitle:blog -inurl:companies -intitle:directory -inurl:jobs -intitle:profile -inurl:dir

Instead of overcomplicating our search, why not just ask for exactly what we need?

Every public profile contains the phrase “Public profile powered by.” You will see it on the right hand side of someone’s profile, next to the familiar LinkedIn logo. If you search for that phrase you will see only profiles. The other types of content such as Answers, Groups, Jobs, Events and Company Pages won’t show up. The best part is you don’t even need any advanced syntax or field search commands such as site: for this to work.

Go ahead, give it a try! Start here: “Public profile powered by” then add some keywords like a company name and job title, even a location using the “Greater Atlanta Area” format. Try this example: http://j.mp/9pgTeM.  Note that you must turn off site compression in order to see the full set of results. Site compression is when you see this at the end of Google or Yahoo search results:

“In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 8 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.”

Clicking on that link turns off site compression and your results will expand, revealing the full power of this simple yet highly effective search. You can always manually turn off site compression on any search by appending &filter=0 to the end of a Google search result URL after you run a query, or appending &dups=1 to a Yahoo search result URL. The links above already have that included for your convenience, so save them as bookmarks/favorites in your browser and you can just add requisition/profile-specific keywords.

If you are curious to test the difference out for yourself, use the exact same criteria from your example above but instead of using our new simple solution, use the old school “long string” one:

site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub OR inurl:in) -intitle:pub -intitle:in -intitle:answers -intitle:updated -intitle:blog -inurl:companies -intitle:directory -inurl:jobs -intitle:profile -inurl:dir

and you will find nearly identical results.

However, next time LinkedIn adds a feature or changes their directory structure, then what happens?  The more complex search technique will stop working, or it may just become less effective and thus waste your time.

So go with the easier, simpler, more elegant solutions.  Those are the ones that typically have the longest-lasting value.  Ping me or comment below to tell me what you think of the “new” LinkedIn searches.

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E-Mail: shally@arbita.net

Posted by Shally Steckerl on May 26, 2010. Filed under Contributors, Shally Steckerl, Sourcing, Thought Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry