FREE LinkedIn Search: Internal vs. X-Ray
While there is a growing number of recruiting professionals and organizations who pay for premium access to LinkedIn, there is still a large number of people who leverage LinkedIn with a free or “Personal” account.
If you’re on the fence about paying for increased access to LinkedIn, you’re reading the right post. I’m going to compare searching LinkedIn from the “inside” with a free “Personal” account using LinkedIn’s new people search interface with searching LinkedIn from the “outside” using Google and the x-ray technique. If you are not familiar with the x-ray search technique, it will be covered in depth with examples later in this post.
FREE LINKEDIN SEARCH – FROM THE “INSIDE”
There are actually a number of different ways and places to search for people on Linkedin. The more powerful methods involve #1 LinkedIn’s advanced search interface and #2 “Hand-coding” search strings using LinkedIn’s advanced search operators.
Controlling Candidate Variables
Both of those methods allow you to control critical candidate variables such as current and/or past employer, current and/or past title, industry, and location via zip code radius search. During or after you configure your search, you also have the option to sort results by relevance, relationship, relationship + recommendations, and keyword match/count.
Search Limits
Once you execute your results, you can see the total number of results – but some people are not aware of the fact that with a free account, you are limited to viewing the first 100 results. Even if your search returns 12,947 results, when you try clicking on page 11 of the results, you will see this:
In and Out of Network Results
In the past, when searching inside of LinkedIn, users were limited to seeing ONLY results of people who are within their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd degree connections. Now, even users with a free account can see both a mix of people inside and outside of their personal network.
However, with a free account, results that are outside of your network do not show a name, are titled “private,” and the profiles have limited information. You must have a premium account to be able to view some/all out of network results and see expanded profiles of out of network results.
Boolean Search Capability
Kudos to LinkedIn for supporting most Boolean search operators and functionality. LinkedIn’s search interface supports:
- Implied AND: While you can type AND, you don’t have to – any space is seen as an AND (like Google)
- OR: You can craft Boolean search strings with multiple OR statements, enclosed by parentheses
- NOT: You can use the NOT operator to limit your results and exclude search terms
- Exact Phrases: You can use quotation marks to denote exact phrases of 2 or more words
java NOT recruiter (Lead OR led OR senior) NOT (.Net OR C#) (AJAX OR Struts) NOT (manager OR director)
When I tried to find out exactly HOW long of a Boolean search string LinkedIn will accept, I lost patience after cramming 316,638 characters into the search bar. No, I am not joking -try it yourself. I got tired of holding a letter down on my keyboard for several minutes. Then I even started copying and pasting large blocks (entire pages) of text into the search bar. Needless to say, LinkedIn will definitely take more than Google’s puny limit of 32 search terms (sorry Google), and Monster’s respectable limit of 500 characters with spaces.
Sadly, LinkedIn does not appear to support any form of root-word or stem searching. I tried using the asterisk to test this functionality, and I was fooled a couple of time when using terms like admin* or manag*. When I tried: unix linux scrip*, scrip* is definitely not pulling script, scripting, scripts, etc.
Reference Search
With a free account, while you can RUN a reference search, you cannot VIEW the results of a reference search:
Saved Searches
A “Personal” LinkedIn account will get you 3 saved searches.
Although not an automated saved search, you can create and save your LinkedIn searches in Notepad or Word and copy and paste them into LinkedIn’s search bar.
You can even create and save searches that incorporate and control when LinkedIn members have joined LinkedIn. For example – here is a search looking for someone who is currently working at Google, with a current title of engineer, who has joined in the last month:
ccompany:google ctitle:engineer joined:m
Results:
You could save that search string in Notepad or Word and copy and paste it into LinkedIn every month to find people who have recently joined LinkedIn in the past month.
FREE LINKEDIN SEARCH – FROM THE “OUTSIDE”
The way to search LinkedIn from the “outside” is to use an Internet search engine such as Google and employ the site: command to tell Google to search and return results only from the LinkedIn domain. This is often referred to as an “x-ray” search, because the search engine is only focusing it’s search “powers” on pages it has indexed from the site/domain you specify.
For example, enter this into Google:
site:linkedin.com java -”manager” -”director” (~develop | ~design) (Ajax | Struts) Weblogic -recruiter (inurl:pub | inurl:in) -intitle:directory
You can see from the results page that every single result comes from www.linkedin.com
The vast majority of LinkedIn members/users do choose to publish their LinkedIn profile to the web, which then enables search engines like Google to index them and allows you to search for and retrieve them.
Controlling Candidate Variables
When using the site: command to x-ray search LinkedIn, you do not have control over all of the candidate variables that you do when you search from within LinkedIn.
You can control, for the most part, current titles. For example:
site:linkedin.com “current * project manager” (inurl:pub | inurl:in) -intitle:directory
However, I am not aware of any reliable way to control past company experience and avoid current experience at a specific employer. Additionally, there does not appear to be a way to control current or past company experience. Searching for a specific company name will yield results of people who have worked at that target company at some point in their career, but not necessarily only in their current or past experience.
Location
You can search for candidates from a specific metro area. For example:
site:linkedin.com “current * project manager” (inurl:pub | inurl:in) -intitle:directory “greater chicago area”
However, there is no way to refine your search by zip code radius as you can using LinkedIn’s search interface.
Industry
You can use Google and the site:command to search LinkedIn and return results of people who have identified themselves as working in a particular industry. For example, let’s pick “Oil & Energy” from LinkedIn’s industry list:
site:linkedin.com “current * project manager” (inurl:pub | inurl:in) -intitle:directory “greater chicago area” “Oil & Energy”
Search Limits
When using the site: command to search LinkedIn, you can review up to 1000 results – 10X the number you can with a LinkedIn “Personal” account. The limit is actually imposed by Google. Even if you get 142,389 total results, you can’t view any results past 1000 (most of the time you can’t even view the 1000th). Try for yourself.
In and Out of Network Results
A HUGE benefit to x-ray searching LinkedIn through an Internet search engine is that you can retrieve and view ANY public profile, whether it’s in or out of your network. Read this post for a thorough look at how to take a nameless ”out of network” result you find from searching within LinkedIn and find it with the name and full profile using Google.
Boolean Search Capability
When searching LinkedIn via an Internet search engine, you are limited to the Boolean operators of the search engine, not LinkedIn. While most Internet search engines, including Google, cannot match LinkedIn’s Boolean search capability or capacity, you CAN effectively create searches to find pretty much anything you need when performing and x-ray search of Linkedin.
Reference Search
There does not appear to be any reliable way to perform a LinkedIn reference search for a specific company using an Internet search engine.
Saved Searches
Using Google, you can create a form of “saved search” of LinkedIn using Google’s Alerts.
With Google Alerts, you can create search strings to x-ray LinkedIn and return results to your email on an “as-it-happens,” once a day, or weekly basis. From the LinkedIn x-ray Google Alerts I have created, you won’t get very many results if your search strings are highly targeted – typically only when a profile has been updated or newly created.
CONCLUSION
Using LinkedIn’s search interface has the benefits of showing you who you are connected to, the ability to sort your results in a variety of ways, and the ability to precisely control many critical candidate variables, such as current/past company experience, current/past title, and location down to a 10 mile radius. Additionally, LinkedIn’s search interface supports relatively complex Boolean search strings for highly specific and targeted searching. However, with a free/”personal” account, you are limited to reviewing 100 results, and results out of your network are not viewable.
X-ray searching LinkedIn using Google and the site: command has the benefits of returning ALL public profiles on LinkedIn that match your search, whether they are in your network or not – and you can view up to 1000. Additionally, using Google to search LinkedIn allows you to search for and control specific industry experience as you can from within LinkedIn. However, when searching LinkedIn with the x-ray technique, you cannot sort your results as you can in LinkedIn, you cannot search by when people have joined LinkedIn, you’re limited to Google’s Boolean search capability and 32 search term limit, and you do not have precise control over current employer or location beyond major metro area (typically a 50 mile radius).
Thankfully when you have a free “Personal” account with LinkedIn, you can take advantage of the best of both worlds – searching LinkedIn from the inside and the outside. If you have a free account and you’re thinking about upgrading to a premium account, be sure to carefully consider whether or not the additional features gained are worth the price considering what you can do for free.
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Great article as always. Not realated to the search, but one thing I would add to the short list of benefits of paying for a LI account(I have a Business+) is that the response rate on InMails is very high – 90+%. I’ve been very impressed.
-kameron
Great work Glen. This is a Six Sigma quality posting. Thanks for conducting the benchmark testing of LinkedIn’s capabilities as it relates to Boolean techniques.
The sourcing community (especially the newbies) should kiss your ring for you sharing your expertise on BooleanBlackBelt.com
Regards,
Matt Kerr
Excellent Article !
I can see the efforts in doing all the research behind it and elaborating it so nicely.
Great Work.
Raj S
Excellent article – much appreciated! hat’s off for sharing this with us Glen! A job well done!!!
Gurjit R
Glen, Great research and testing of the whole question!! THANKS FOR ALL YOUR EFFORTS and for sharing your article with all of us.
Paul C
Great Job!
Let me know how you do this?……..Amazing……..
It’s just like Believe it OR not……
Ben
While you are correct that variations of root words are not supported as a rule on LinkedIn’s own search, there are some variant forms of words that LinkedIn supports (e.g., Dir also finds Director) but it’s a limited lexicon.
I have tried as ’site:linkedin.com (”United Kingdom”) -intitle:directory’, but I am getting result from events also. But I need to search only companies which is at UK or search only for candidates at UK. Can you please suggest how to give the keywords.
Wow, this is outstanding – I’m the farthese thing from a Boolean expert, but I’ve been searching through Linkedin for years and this is one of the coolest tricks I’ve read about.
One thing, and apologies if this is something very basic, but how does one restrict a search by *country*, ie., all the PMs in Oil and Industry in Denmark, for example. I tried using the -country: without success..
either way, thanks for publishing this piece – it’s fantastic.
Such a wonderful post.An excellent article.Thanks for sharing
Great job done Glenn,
Boolean techniques do really help …
Thanks & regards,
Nikhil.G
Great! Fantastic! Thanj you veeeery much:)
Is it possible to do an x-ray on linkedin and search by ‘joined’ date? Thanks
Glen, love this post – thank you!
Do you know if it’s possible to search on the customized notes field in LinkedIn? When I connect with someone I usually add a short note (e.g. Met at the XXX conference in June 2010); however, I cannot search on this field in LinkedIn. Looking for a creative solution….
@Gururajesh – you can now X-Ray LinkedIn by specific country code/site – here is the complete list.
@Alexa – It doesn’t appear that you can search for words in LinkedIn sent mail/messages/invitations – at least not that I have found yet. I will look into it further and see what I can dig up. Take care, and thanks for reading!