I could say a lot on this subject, but one thing I should mention is that you effectively describe LinkedIn’s “relevance” sort as somehow “different” than Google’s, but that’s only true in the details: when you do a search on Google (or Yahoo, etc), do you think they only take into account the keywords and boolean structure you put into the query? Of course not – they do fantastic work to limit spam and properly weight sites which are “authorities” on a subject (that’s the whole magic of PageRank).

LinkedIn’s relevance sort is doing something similar, but since the data set isn’t the web, PageRank doesn’t make sense to help inform the keyword relevance. What does make sense, to help filter out the noise, the mostly empty profiles, the people who maybe haven’t updated in ages or are only connected to a couple friends and don’t really have a presence on there, is to let the social graph act as a weighting filter in a similar way that the web-link graph acts for Google.

The thing that’s different for LinkedIn, in comparison to Google, is that instead of just using the global structure of the graph, the local structure (who *you* are connected to) can take part. This helps you actually find a way to contact the people you’ve found, once you find them (because they’re more likely to be someone within two to three degrees away from you).

Just like any good search engine, there is some domain-specific special sauce that goes into LinkedIn’s search, because once you start looking at the data, you see that relevance is not such a cut-and-dry “how many times did my search term match in the title vs. the description field?”.

-jake

Your thoughts?

Or did I completely misunderstood you?

As far as my testing and experimentation (albeit limited to this point) has shown so far, it appears that LinkedIn heavily favors keywords mentioned in title fields – including title headers for recommendations. Also, while I see keywords highlighted in the “specialties” section, they aren’t highlighted in the “summary” section even when present – which seems odd to me.

When I run searches and sort by keyword instead of LinkedIn’s proprietary “relevance” sorting, I am not terribly impressed with the top ranked results – many have multiple title hits, but don’t even have their experience sections filled in with any information. For me, true relevance has less to do with titles and more to do with responsibilities.

For job seekers, figuring out LinkedIn SEO is absolutely critical – because if sourcers and recruiters are running searches to find people with certain experience, it helps to know which fields are the most heavily weighed in how LinkedIn determines keyword relevance/sorting – because showing up at the BOTTOM of 100’s of results is a sure way NOT to be found!

This is a VERY important question that needs to be discussed. Many LinkedIn users and job seeker are not aware that the default relevant sort results that hiring managers and recruiters are seeing, may make them irrelevant and therefore invisible. The average LinkedIn user does not use complex keyword Boolean search. They enter a job title or a company and select a zip code or city. They review the top 10 or 20 result and rarely look at the top 100 available to the standard user.

Most of us get great “relevant” results with Google, so most searchers just trust LinkedIn search is like Google. What does a job seeker need to do to be in the top 10? Can someone game the system and really not be relevant? Are bad candidate doing this now?

Sincerely,

Eric Jaquith

Keep up the great work!

PS: Sorting by connections is only available in the advance search beta and was removed from the standard advance search. Users need to go to the people advance search page and look below the search button at the bottom. They will see this”

” New! Try our new People Search Beta featuring dynamic search refinements. ”

Click this link access the beta screen
http://www.linkedin.com/search?optIn=

Thanks again!

Thanks for this interesting post. The fact that “Search people” is such a frequent action makes this post actionable even to LinkedIn users who only have a white belt.

You may want to know searching by Connection is still not available to all users.

I am going to stress the Keywords Vs. Relevance point you made in my free presentation trying to help out job seekers with 50-300 connections – thank you… http://www.slideshare.net/danielalfon/advanced-linkedin-guide-for-puzzled-2009-job-seekers

All the best,