For a while, there was an interesting little method for revealing the full name of 3rd degree and group connections on LinkedIn. However, LinkedIn has changed the “get introduced” functionality and UI for most people and effectively eliminated that method (albeit unintentionally, IMO).

Oh well – it was easy and fun while it lasted.

Fortunately, I’ve recently become aware of another way of revealing the full names of 3rd degree connections on LinkedIn with a less-than-premium account that I would like to share with you.

But before we get to that, I’d like to cover some basics as well as some things I have been noticing about LinkedIn – I believe they may be tinkering with free access profile visibility.

Oh, and if you’re on the fence about attending SourceCon in Atlanta next week, it’s shaping up to be the largest in SourceCon history, and you still have time to register and get a 10% discount using my SC12GC code.

LinkedIn Public Profile Search to View Full Names

Now that the nifty “get introduced” full name visibility trick is seemingly dead, people without LinkedIn Recruiter access can of course still grab one or more unique phrases from 3rd degree and group-only LinkedIn connections and throw them into Bing or Google to find their public profile and thus their full names.

For example, I can take the headline phrase and couple it with the location phrase from a LinkedIn search result…

…and enter this into Bing: “Senior Software Development Manager, IBM” “Ottawa, Canada Area”, and here’s what I get:

You can do the same thing with Google, but Google’s first result isn’t the profile we’re looking for – that’s why I favor Bing for this technique. Google seems to index all of the nooks and crannies of LinkedIn yielding “dirty” and irrelevant results when searching for LinkedIn profile word/phrase combinations.

Is LinkedIn Tinkering with Public Profile Visibility?

I am sure I am not alone in noticing changes to the standard LinkedIn X-Ray search results.

For example, while you could see the full names of 3rd degree and group-only connections after clicking on a search result even if you were logged into LinkedIn, now I am finding that if I am logged in, once I click on a Google or Bing LinkedIn site: search result, LinkedIn recognizes that I am not connected to the person at the 1st or 2nd degree and thus only shows me the first name and last name initial.

Here is a screenshot of my Google search and the result – the full name is displayed:

However, once I click on the search result, if I am logged into LinkedIn, I only see the first name:

I know for a fact this has not always the case – I’ve been training people on this for years and I’ve done this 1,000′s of times.

Big deal?

No – but I still find it interesting to notice changes like this because it means what we have all been wondering about (fearing?) may finally be coming – evidence that LinkedIn is working to limit or close off free access to LinkedIn data.

In fact, I’ve also been running into some seemingly random funny business with LinkedIn public profile URL’s. I have encountered a number of instances in which I’m using either Chrome or IE and I click on (or cut and paste) a public profile link, LinkedIn tells me that the profile is not found, when I know it does exist because I just looked at it.

For example here’s one I found while writing this post:

When I click on that link or cut and paste it in Chrome or IE, this is what I get:

So far, there is no pattern to it that I can tell – and I have only begun to notice this in that past few weeks.

I am not sure what it is indicative of, but wondered if anyone else has encountered this and might have some insight.

Using Alumni Search to View Full Names of 3rd Degree Connections on LinkedIn

Last week, Patrick Ryan, a former colleague with whom I stay in touch, sent me an email with something he had discovered on LinkedIn. I asked him if he minded if I wrote about it and he said no, so here we go.

If you scroll down your LinkedIn home page, you’ll find the “Just joined LinkedIn” section with Colleagues and Alumni.

If you click on the school name under Alumni, you’ll be taken to an attractive dashboard with some interesting information.

From here, you can change the years attended, show alumni that don’t show a graduation date, and of course search.

When you configure your search and see some 3rd degree connections without full names, this is what they will look like – first name only:

If you click on “Connect” and you’re using either Chrome, Firefox or Safari (not IE – sorry), you’ll get a pop up that will allow you to send the person an invitation, and it will also show the person’s full name.

Okay – I am sure some of you are thinking, “Cool – but this is extremely limited because I can only search alumni from my school.”

Sure, it’s limited, but let’s just say you can similarly search through any school that’s in the education section of your LinkedIn profile.

Oh, and each school as a school ID. For example, mine is 18570.

Final Thoughts

You don’t need to have a premium LinkedIn account to view any public profile and see the full names of people who are not 1st or 2nd degree connections.

However, it’s not safe to assume that the ways in which we can currently search for and view the information on LinkedIn profiles beyond our network will remain unchanged.

In fact, I believe we can expect LinkedIn to develop ways that limit the ability to find and view certain info on LinkedIn profiles for free – and why shouldn’t we? LinkedIn isn’t a non-profit, and just as any other for-profit company, it’s their prerogative to look for ways to make money and to reasonably limit giving away too much for free.

Will LinkedIn read this post and change the ability to view full names of 3rd degree connections via alumni search?

Yes, they will read this post (Hi LinkedIn team – special shout-out to the Ninja!).

Maybe they will do something to change the appropriate functionality.

If they do, I’m happy to have helped.

I was recently performing some searches on Bing and came across something curious that I had never noticed before.

I’m not exactly sure if what I found is new or simply something I’ve overlooked in the past. I updated Twitter with “Did you know that Bing supports the + query modifier?” on November 10th, wondering if it was something that other people knew about.

I only received a few responses, including a couple from noted sourcing luminaries, and the consensus was that I didn’t find anything because it wasn’t documented anywhere and they could not get it to work.

However, the +/Plus sign does in fact work when searching Bing – just not like it used to in Google.

It’s always a little exciting to think you are one of the first people to stumble across something most people don’t know about, although I won’t get my hopes up that I’m the only person outside of some folks at Microsoft who’s ever figured out that Bing supports the +/Plus sign in searches.

This discovery also led me to proof of Bing leveraging semantic and phonetic search. 

Bing Search Supports the +/Plus Sign

So I was tinkering around on Bing testing very basic LinkedIn X-Ray searches (more on that later), and here’s my original Bing search of LinkedIn: site:linkedin.com “location Houston” java

Here are the results I found – notice anything odd?

I immediately noticed that the 3rd, 4th, and 5th results highlighted keyword hits of “Coffee.”

My first response was confusion – I could not recall Bing ever trying to so obviously perform semantic search and attempt to guess what I might be looking for by returning results with related terms I didn’t actually search for.

Then I scanned back up the page and noticed something similar to what I see on Google all the time, typically when Google thinks I might have misspelled something:

When I clicked on “Do you want results for site:linkedin.com “location Houston java,” this is what I saw:

The first thing I noticed was the +/Plus sign.

I could not recall ever seeing it before when searching Bing.

Then I looked at the results, and it was obvious that the +/Plus sign was serving to remove Bing’s attempt at semantic search and only return results with the exact terms I searched for.

No more results mentioning “coffee” when I was searching for Java.

If you think my observation of the +/Plus sign was a fluke, the very next day I was helping one of my associates with a search and noticed he used “HSCM” in an OR statement for a PeopleSoft FSCM position. I had never encountered HSCM before on a resume making reference to anything PeopleSoft SCM related, so I Binged it.

My search was simply PeopleSoft HSCM.

When I saw the results, I noticed the “Including results for peoplesoft hcm,” even though I searched for HSCM.

In this case, I don’t think Bing was trying to perform semantic search and return a related search term – I think Bing was actually steering me towards a spelling variant that is more common to Bing’s index, perhaps assuming that I misspelled the term in my original search.

When I clicked on “Do you want results for PeopleSoft HSCM,” there were only 31 results, and the +/Plus sign was there, preceding the search string:

If you try the same search on Google, Google doesn’t give you the benefit of the doubt and simply assumes you misspelled your search term and gives you results for what Google assumes you were searching for.

How rude.

I know it’s a stretch, but there are some people who actually do know what they are searching for and would rather not have their searches hijacked.

Bing vs. Google

I was a very early adpoter of Google’s search engine (think 1998), preferring it over what most “power searchers” were using back then (think AltaVista).

For many years I was a Google extremist – I used Google search for literally all of my searching needs and never bothered to search using any other Internet search engine except for experimental poking around.

However, not too long ago, after getting frustrated with the junk Google was returning in my LinkedIn searches as well as Google more frequently questioning my humanity by forcing me to jump through CAPTCHA hoops , my experimental poking around with Bing got more serious.

At this time, I use Bing more than I use Google – I’d estimate a 60/40 split.

Part of this is driven by the fact that I find Bing X-Ray searches of LinkedIn are so much “cleaner” and not subject to as much “noise” as Google search results. I also find searching for LinkedIn profile headline phrases in Bing to do a very good job of returning the profile I’m looking for, even if I don’t use the site: command to specifically search LinkedIn.

And of course I love the fact that Bing supports configurable proximity with the NEAR:X search functionality, allowing me to perform feats of magic and semantic search at the sentence level.

I also like the fact that, as I showed above, Bing will by default include your search terms along with results of terms it thinks you might find relevant.

With similar searches, Google just assumes you don’t really know what you were searching for and gives you results of what it thinks you were searching for.

And if you happen to be searching for flights, Bing’s Price Predictor totally rocks!

Unrelated to sourcing and recruiting, I know – but a gem nonetheless!

Bing Searchers Beware of Semantic and Phonetic Search

Now that I am on the lookout for Bing’s semantic search, I’ve noticed that sometimes Bing will slip in semantic search results without giving you the “Including results for ____ / Do you want results for _____” heads-up that lets you know Bing has included results with terms you didn’t actually search for that Bing thinks is related and relevant.

For example, here are the first page search results for a Java search that returns “Coffee” and more interestingly “Coffey” – which means that Bing is not only going semantic by returning words that may have a similar meaning in certain contexts, but also phonetic, returning words that sound similar to the search term.

If you explore the cached page for the Coffey result, you will notice that there isn’t any mention of Java anywhere, so the only thing I can conclude is that Bing took my search term of Java and leveraged semantics to also search for coffee as well as phonetic variants, such as Coffey.

I know there have to be a few fellow search geeks that find that prospect to be quite interesting. It looks like the folks behind Bing search have been busy!

In any event, the real lesson here is that Bing didn’t give me a heads-up that it decided to also return results with terms I didn’t actually search for.

So, if you’re using Bing to search for anything and you don’t want it taking any liberties with semantic search because you only want results with the exact search terms you used, be sure to add a +/Plus sign to the beginning of your search, like so:

Would you like to know how I search LinkedIn when sourcing for talent?

I don’t have a premium LinkedIn account, so you may be surprised to learn that I don’t X-Ray search LinkedIn all that often.

I’ll tell you why in a moment, but first I would like to share my inspiration for this post.

I recently read a great post that addressed an issue with X-Ray searching LinkedIn and that pointed out that pattern recognition is critical to effective online sourcing.

I could not agree more – truly dynamic pattern recognition is something I think is unique to humans and is something that I believe cannot be replicated by applications claiming to leverage artificial intelligence, semantic search, and Natural Language Processing (NLP). I could elaborate further on this topic, but that would unfortunately bore 98% of my readers, so I will save it for another post that they can choose not to read later.

Suffice it to say I wholeheartedly agree that is it more important to have the right investigative thought process than to have any specific Boolean search string or pre-built X-Ray search.

Getting back to how I specifically search LinkedIn to find people – you first need to understand some of the significant issues associated with using Internet search engines in an attempt to find public LinkedIn profiles. In other words, you should know they “why” before the “how.”

As an added bonus, you’ll also find that I’ve discovered that Bing and LinkedIn apparently don’t play well together anymore, and I’ll issue a LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge to the international sourcing and recruiting community to crowdsource the solution.

The Problem with Using Google to X-Ray Search LinkedIn

In the aforementioned article, the author suggested to search for the phrase “contact settings” in Google X-Ray searches of LinkedIn to isolate public profiles from non-profile false positive search results rather than using slightly more labor/Boolean intensive search logic such as the example they use site:ie.linkedin.com (inurl:in | inurl:pub) -inurl:dir -inurl:title “primary school teacher” or even one of my takes on the same search: site:ie.linkedin.com in | pub -dir “primary school teacher” (short and sweet!).

I’ve searched for other terms on LinkedIn that are well-indexed, but I had never tried the “contact settings” phrase before, so I immediately tested it and it seems to work quite well to isolate profiles from non-profile results.

I really appreciate the fact that they did not simply take someone else’s X-Ray string and use it without wondering if there might be another way. As Thomas Edison once said, “There is always a better way.”

The example Google X-Ray search they used in their post pulls 270 results from LinkedIn:  site:ie.linkedin.com “contact settings” “primary school teacher”

You’ll notice that if you click the links for the search results above, I take you to the last page of results. That’s because no one should care about Google’s estimated number of results that show up on page 1 – you should always click through to the last page.  At that point, you can click Google’s “repeat the search with the omitted results included“ - although you still won’t get the number of results that Google estimated page 1 if you click through to the last page, and you gain mostly (if not all) duplicates.

As I clicked through the search results for primary school teachers in Ireland, I noticed a pattern that the article’s author prepared me for – false positive results coming from this area on profiles – let’s call it the “box of false positives”

They probably didn’t, but if anyone at LinkedIn actually thought to design any part of that section to make it more difficult to precisely X-Ray search LinkedIn, my hat’s off to you – it’s good work.

Intentional or not, that part of public profiles is responsible for producing a solid quantity of false positive results – profiles that actually don’t match your search.

How many?

I’m glad you asked, because I actually took the time to find out – at least with the search suggested by the www.socialtalent.co blog author.

Out of the first set of results from the site:ie.linkedin.com “Contact Settings” “Primary School Teacher” search, without clicking to search with the omitted results included, I got 270 results.

I scraped all 270 results into Excel and sorted them by name. Of those 270, there are 193 unique names, leaving 77 duplicate names – which is nearly 30%.

There are a few duplicate profiles of people who obviously created one LinkedIn profile, abandoned it and/or simply created another one – here is one example.

However, the vast majority of the duplicates come in the form of false positive results of people who share the same name of a legitimately matching positive result, but when you click through to their profile, there are clearly a false positive, as the phrase “primary school teacher” cannot be found anywhere on the profile. In many cases, not even in the box of false positives.

Here is an example of 5 hits for the same name – if you take the time to open all 5 results, only one of results mentions “primary school teacher.”

Taking a look at one of the false positive results, you will see there is actually no mention of the search phrase we used of “primary school teacher” – not even in the box of false positives. However, clicking on the cached result shows us why the result came up – and it is directly attributable to the false positive box:

So, while the actual profile page on LinkedIn doesn’t currently have any mention of “primary school teacher,” it did actually have a mention of “primary school teacher” from the “More professionals named _______” box the last time Google took a snapshot of that person’s public profile. By the way – has anyone else noticed that Google’s cached results are acting buggy lately?

Now that you have seen perhaps one of the largest flies in the ointment of LinkedIn X-Ray search (nearly 30% false positives), let me tell you how I personally go about searching LinkedIn.

How I Search LinkedIn

I start searching LinkedIn using LinkedIn’s search interface 100% of the time.

Why?

Because:

1. With its structured fields and facets, LinkedIn’s search interface is much more powerful and precise than any Internet search engine
2. I’ve taken the time to significantly build my LinkedIn network so that a great number of people show up in my search results within my network – all sourcers and recruiters should do the same
3. Using an Internet search engine to search for public LinkedIn profiles is intrinsically limited and challenging – false positives will always be an issue, and LinkedIn and the Internet search engines can change their indexing at any time – what works well today may not work well tomorrow

The only time I really X-Ray search LinkedIn (other than tinkering around) is to find the specific public profiles of LinkedIn search results who are beyond my LinkedIn network.

I’ve found that when I grab phrases or combinations of terms from LinkedIn profiles that are beyond my LinkedIn network and search for them on Google or Bing, I typically get very “clean” results – in other words, the profile i am looking for, without a load of false positives.

Ultimately, I have found that the return on time invested when searching LinkedIn is higher when you start with LinkedIn and use Internet search engines to find the profiles of specific people, as opposed to starting a search with an Internet search engine to X-Ray LinkedIn to identify people.

LinkedIn No Longer Plays Nice with Bing?

As a timely example of point #3 above, I was going to use Bing to demonstrate a few things in this post – specifically to show how use can use Bing to create a very concise and simple X-Ray search that only uses the word “powered” to target public profiles. However, I have found that something has changed significantly with how well Bing and LinkedIn play together.

For example, check out how only 28 results come back from this Bing search: site:ie.linkedin.com. Interestingly, Yahoo’s Site Explorer pulls over 550,000 results. Google pulls over an estimated 800,000 results with the same simple search.

Also interesting is that a simple search like this site:linkedin.com java “greater atlanta area” on Bing only pulls 44 results, when it should pull tens of thousands of results with a load of false positives, as it does on Google.

Score 1 for Team LinkedIn if they had anything to do with recently altering Bing’s heretofore superior LinkedIn X-Ray search results.

If anyone has any insight into the very recent changes in Bing X-Ray searches of LinkedIn, please let me know.

LinkedIn X-Ray Search Challenge

Let’s crowdsource a LinkedIn sourcing solution!

Similar to my recent LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge to eliminate location-based false positive results, I’d like to challenge the international sourcing and recruiting community to come up with LinkedIn X-Ray searches that only return profiles that match the keywords searched for, and do not return any false positive results coming from the “Find a different ________” box of false positives.

Is it possible?

Let’s find out!

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across something on LinkedIn that I am surprised I never noticed before – I’m not even certain if/when LinkedIn made the change.

Finally sitting down to write about it, I highly doubted that I could be the only person to have discovered this interesting little find, so I did some quick research and found that Gary Cozin and Cathy Ou recently noticed it as well.

What am I talking about?

I’m talking about the fact that LinkedIn has alternate location names for certain postal codes.

While some locations only have one location phrase, I’ve found many have two and some have as many as nine! If you use Internet search engines to “X-Ray” LinkedIn for public profiles and you only use one location phrase, you may be unknowingly excluding people you actually want to find!

Alternate Location Names on LinkedIn

I personally discovered that LinkedIn has multiple location phrases when I went to edit my profile a couple of weeks back.

I wasn’t changing my location, but this caught my eye:

Apparently, “Greater Atlanta Area” is the default.

Having noticed “Atlanta, Georgia” for the first time, I immediately when to Google and Bing to see how many people did not use the default “Greater Atlanta Area” location name.

I tried this search: site:linkedin.com “location * atlanta georgia” -”greater atlanta area” (inurl:pub | inurl:in) -dir

As you can see, after a few false positive results, plenty of people use the alternate location phrase/name. But don’t be fooled by Google’s estimated 100,000+ results – if you click through all of the pages you will end up on page 50 with slightly shy of 500 results.

Switching to Bing, I tried something similar: site:linkedin.com location near:8 “atlanta georgia” -”greater atlanta area” -dir

Bing claims nearly 3,000 people use the alternate LinkedIn location phrase/name, but if you click through to the last page of results, you should get slightly over 500. Interestingly, I noticed some false positive results crept in that should have been excluded by the search – but looking further into that is another post entirely.

So What’s the BIG Deal?

Although my test searches didn’t discover a ton of people using the alternate location name in Atlanta, if you don’t include the alternate location phrase(s) in your LinkedIn X-Ray searches of your target locations, you will unknowingly relegate people who do not use the default location phrase into the realm of LinkedIn’s Dark Matter – profiles that exist but your searches prevent you from discovering them.

For example, here are about 24 people in the Atlanta area who mention Java or J2EE on their LinkedIn profiles that cannot be retrieved with an X-Ray search that only targets “Greater Atlanta Area.”

What you should notice is that the public profiles of people who use the alternate location name show only the specific non-default location name that was searched for…

…however, if you click on “View Full Profile,” you will see something different – both the user-selected, non-default location name as well as the default location name:

On the full profile, you can mouse over either location listed and use them as a faceted search. On a public profile listing, you cannot click on the location name to conduct a search.

How Many LinkedIn Location Name Variants Are There?

While it appears that there is a pattern of 2 location phrase/name options for major U.S. cities (I checked New York City and a few others – you’ll have to check yours), I did stumble across the fact that some areas within certain countries have many more location names to choose from.

For example, check out this list for Postal Code AL2 1AB in the U.K.!

That probably isn’t the only postal code/area in the world that has more than a few location names, so if you rely heavily on X-Ray searching LinkedIn for sourcing talent, I highly recommend you scope out all of the location names for all of the cities/areas you source from.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, some of you don’t have to worry about multiple LinkedIn location names at all – some locations and even countries don’t have any postal codes and/or LinkedIn doesn’t recognize them, so there is only one location name (unless I am missing something):

Update Your LinkedIn X-Ray Searches

I’m not sure when LinkedIn enabled the ability for users to choose amongst multiple location names per postal code – do you know?

Regardless, I’m excited to share this on a global scale – if use Internet search engines to “X-Ray” public profiles on LinkedIn, be sure to search for all of the location names that users in your target geography have to choose from. If you don’t, you are likely to unknowingly prevent some available results from being returned.

Of course, if you have a LinkedIn Recruiter account, you don’t really have to worry about finding people via X-Ray searches…

Happy hunting!

I was extremely pleased to receive many responses/solutions to the Ruby LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge I posted recently, including some from well-known online sourcing heavyweights, as well as a number from other talented folks who came out of the Internet ether from several continents to show off their skills and take a crack at solving the challenge.

Kudos to those who successfully found people on LinkedIn who have experience with Ruby but do not make explicit mention of it on their profile!

I sincerely hope everyone appreciated seeing the various approaches and methods people utilized to solve the first LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge – that was my primary motivator in posting it.

One thing I noticed from some of the responses is that for a few people, the challenge seemed too easy.

So – if you’re up for another LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge, take a crack at this one – it’s at least a degree more difficult than the last.

X-Ray Location False Positives

Have you ever noticed that when you X-Ray search LinkedIn targeting a specific metro area, some of your results are not actually of profiles of people who live in your targeted metro area?

If you haven’t, let me show you.

Here is a basic LinkedIn X-Ray search: site:linkedin.com “greater Atlanta area” java j2ee weblogic -dir

If you look at the 8th result, you will see that the person does not live in Atlanta. Rather, he lives in the “Dallas/Fort Worth Area.”

So how does this result turn up?

Initially, I was confused when I saw these results popping up. However, a quick click of the cached result shows exactly why these kinds of non-local profiles appear in your searches:

Location false positive results like these are returned because there are positive hits on the “standard” search terms (e.g., Java, J2ee, weblogic) from the LinkedIn profile itself, and a positive hit on “Greater Atlanta Area” in the section of “Find a different _____ _____” section of public search results.

I don’t think this phenomenon was intentional on LinkedIn’s part, although it would certainly be interesting if it was.

The LinkedIn Sourcing Challenge

Find a way to X-Ray LinkedIn for profiles from a specific metro area that:

1. Reliably eliminates location false positives
2. Does not eliminate any profiles that actually are from your target metro area

A bit of advice – before you try to whip through this challenge thinking you have it solved, be sure to thoroughly test your proposed solution.

That means checking multiple pages of results to ensure no profiles of people who do not live in your target metro area have leaked in, as well as making sure your solution doesn’t accidentally or unnecessarily reduce the overall number of legitimate results of local profiles. If the number of results from your solution seems low for the types of people you’re looking for, your solution likely eliminated profiles you didn’t want to.

Who can crack this challenge?

If you happen to do quite a bit of LinkedIn X-Ray searching, you might be noticing that some people are taking control of how they appear in public search results.

Or maybe you aren’t noticing it, because you can’t.

Confused?

Read on to learn more.

LinkedIn Profile Changes

I’m not exactly sure when this change was introduced (anyone?), but I recently noticed that LinkedIn is taking very obvious efforts to bring the editing/control of the public profile to the attention of users.

They’re obvious to me at least.

When you look over to the right side of your profile, you will notice “Change Public Profile Settings:”

When you click that, you get this huge blue call-out:

How’s that for in-your-face?

In the LinkedIn learning center, if you scroll down and take a look at the Public Profile section, you will notice some very descriptive text explaining exactly what the public profile is – “the profile that will be shown to users not signed-in to LinkedIn that are searching for you via search engines like Google.”

Similarly, in the section where you can customize your public profile, LinkedIn directly suggests you “control how you appear when people search for you on Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc.”

Big Deal?

No, not really.

However, I personally find it interesting to watch LinkedIn’s first obvious move to educate their members on their public profile – specifically with regard to commenting directly to the technique of searching for LinkedIn profiles via the web.

Before the above changes, to the average (non-recruiter/sourcer/power) user, it wasn’t very obvious what the public profile was, let alone how making changes would affect anything, or that people actually do use Internet search engines to find LinkedIn profiles.

To the regular LinkedIn user, these new phrases (e.g., “control how you appear when people search for you on Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc.) won’t warrant special attention. To power users, especially sourcers/recruiters – they are obvious counter-moves to effective X-Ray searching.

Which is fine – we’ve all been suspecting that LinkedIn would be making some changes. I’m personally surprised it’s taken so long.

How You Might Be Affected

What happens if someone selects “Basics” for their public profile?

That means that only their name, industry, location, number of recommendations is findable/visible in an Internet search.

Which means that if you are searching for people on LinkedIn and you are using Bing or Google to do so, you simply can’t find people who selected “Basics” with keyword/title searches because LinkedIn isn’t showing the titles and keywords in the headline, summary, specialties, skills, current position, past positions, education and additional information sections to Internet crawlers.

It also means that if you are searching inside of LinkedIn and find a profile that is not in your network, you may not be able to take a person’s headline or other text from the LinkedIn profile and search for it and actually find it with an Internet search engine – because it won’t be there. It might be cached for a short while, but after some time, Bing, Google and Yahoo! won’t have it anymore.

Lastly, if more people select “Make my public profile visible to no one,” these folks won’t be showing up in any of your X-Ray searches, even by name.

The Good News

The average LinkedIn user (not people like us) visits LinkedIn 3 times per month (that’s a quantified stat).

These people don’t really dive deep into configuring their profile (which poses a challenge to identifying/retrieving them in the first place if they don’t list any experience!!!), let alone their account and public profile settings. Of course – this may change over time, but I don’t see it as rapid or high volume.

On the other end of the spectrum, more savvy LinkedIn users (non-recruiters) may likely see the benefit of being able to show up in searches on the Internet based on more info than just the “Basics,” which is pretty much only good for finding someone with a direct name search.

It is unfortunate that more people, including active, passive and non-job seekers, don’t understand that if they want to be found by others who are beyond their network on LinkedIn that they need to be “findable” via the Internet. That means actually entering some information on their LinkedIn profile beyond titles and companies and also not limiting their public profiles to “Basic.”

On a last note – it’s nice to see that LinkedIn’s first moves in this space aren’t technical in nature (directly affecting X-Ray search results), but rather passive user-behavior education/modification.

Like many, I am waiting to see LinkedIn’s next move.

Beginning early last week, I’ve had a few people reach out to me and ask about some changes LinkedIn is apparently making to the public profile listings.

In the past, I’ve written about how Bing is easier and more effective at searching LinkedIn profiles than Google.

One of my suggestions for targeting profiles an avoiding directory and job results was to search for the word “powered,” because public profiles on LinkedIn have the phrase “Public profile powered by,” and the word “powered” seemed to be unique only to profiles.

LinkedIn is Tinkering

While you can still search LinkedIn via Bing using +powered and find results, the only reason it seems to work is due to the fact that Bing has taken “snapshots” of the old LinkedIn profiles the last time Bing’s crawlers have visited them. The original (non-cached) search results don’t mention “powered.”

I’ve found that many (all?) public LinkedIn profiles no longer mention the phrase “Public profile powered by,” so adding +powered to your LinkedIn X-Ray searches via Bing will prevent some public LinkedIn profiles from being returned in your searches – and you won’t even know it.

But now you do.

For example, this is what you might find now when you search for someone on LinkedIn using Bing or Google.

Notice there is no mention of “Public profile powered by.”

If you tried using Bing to search for Jenny’s public profile using +powered, you won’t find her: site:linkedin.com +powered jenny devaughn “greater atlanta area”

What does this mean?

If you’re a sourcer or recruiter using Bing to search for LinkedIn profiles, you need to find another way to target profiles and avoid directory results and jobs.

Here are two suggestions:

#1 Add -dir to your Bing search string

site:linkedin.com “greater atlanta area” java j2ee weblogic -dir

Even though adding -dir only eliminates directory results and isn’t designed to avoid job listings, Bing doesn’t appear to leak in job results like Google does.

In the above search, there is only 1 job listing out of all of the results, and it is on the very last page.

That’s one of the reasons why I like Bing over Google for LinkedIn searching – because the results tend to be naturally “cleaner” in terms of returning profiles and not other types of LinkedIn results.

I’m sure a few of you have noticed that I did not use -inurl: in the search examples – that’s because Bing doesn’t support it.

You will get search results if you try to use -inurl:dir, which may give you the perception that your search “worked,” but it does not eliminate directory results.

Although Bing does support url:, -url:dir doesn’t work either.

Besides, just adding -dir works relatively well in and of itself.

Here are some profile results you simply cannot find by using +powered to search LinkedIn via Bing: site:linkedin.com +”greater atlanta area” java j2ee weblogic -powered -dir

#2 Target a phrase that is common & unique to public LinkedIn profile listings

This is an effective way of targeting public LinkedIn profile results and avoid non-profile results.

You can take phrases from this area of public profiles and add them to your X-Ray searches:

Although you will get some slight variation in the exact number of search results for different phrases, this approach seems to work reasonably well:

For example:

• “see who”
• “know in common”
• “get introduced”
• “search for”

Happy hunting!

11/13/11 Note: I’ve provided some updated LinkedIn X-Ray search string syntax examples at the end of this post.

I recently received a message via LinkedIn from Gary Cozin, an accomplished, well known player and knowledge sharer in sourcing circles, asking me a question:

“You know when we xray Google for LI profiles we can insert “current * financial advisor” in our string to bring back ‘current’ job titles we want. Do you know how would that be done in Bing?

Now, I have been a long-time user of Google for X-Ray searching LinkedIn. However, Google’s recently made some changes to the way LinkedIn X-Ray search results are returned that has made sourcers and recruiters add additional terms to X-Ray strings to an already lengthy search string to return only profiles (e.g., -inurl:dir, -inurl:jobs…).

Not long after Google made those changes, Shally Steckerl posted an article detailing a novel approach to X-Ray searching LinkedIn using the phrase “Public profile powered by,” which seemed to allow searchers to not have to resort to the cumbersome (inurl:in OR inurl:pub) -intitle:directory -inurl:dir -inurl:jobs, etc. search syntax.

While that approach definitely works, Irina Shamaeva and I have found it doesn’t seem to find and return all available results. Even so, there is no denying that it is a much simpler (and shorter!) method for finding LinkedIn profiles via Internet search engines. Why unnecessarily over-complicate search strings?

So, with Google’s recent changes coupled with their annoyingly overzealous blocking of more complex searches (in some cases you don’t even get a chance to use a CAPTCHA to prove you’re human!), I was happy and curious to see if there was in fact a way to accomplish what Gary was looking to do using a search engine other than Google.

My First Bing Current Title X-Ray Search Experiment

When using Google to search LinkedIn to find people with specific current titles, this is the area of LinkedIn profiles people target:

With Google, you can leverage the asterisk (single or multiple word wildcard) to “bridge the gap” between the word Current and the Title, because you can’t actually search for the bullet separating the two For example, “current * financial advisor.”

Bing and Yahoo (which uses Bing’s search) don’t have a similar operator or functionality. However, I was curious to see what Bing would do if I simply searched for the phrase “Current Financial Advisor:”

site:linkedin.com “current financial advisor” “greater new york city area” “public profile powered by”

A little over 1100 results, and they look clean (profiles only) and accurate to me:

When you click on a cached result, you can see our current title phrase search is working, despite the bullet separating the word “Current” and “Financial Advisor:”

It is important to note that if you click through the results, out to page 17 for example, you’ll notice Bing drops the estimated number of results from over 1100 down to 373.

Although the results look good, my sourcing sixth sense is telling me that we’re not seeing all of the available results.

Deeper Down the Bing X-Ray Rabbit Hole

Trying to think of another angle to take, I took a closer look at the structure of the LinkedIn profile.

I noticed that title phrases are always in the format of “TITLE at COMPANY.” In the above screenshot, it’s “Financial Advisor at Wachovia.”

Because of this consistency, I thought I would try dropping the search for the term “current” altogether and isolate and target “Financial Advisor at”

site:linkedin.com “financial advisor at” “greater new york city area” “public profile powered by”

Over 2000 results, and they look accurate and clean (profiles only):

Checking out a cached result verifies it’s working they way I wanted it to:

If you click through the results of this search, you’ll notice the total number of results drops from an initially estimated 2000+ down to 728, but that is still nearly double the number of real results returned by the “Current Financial Advisor” search. Turns out my sourcing sixth sense was right.

All is Not Perfect (or Current)

Dropping the word “current” from the search string and simply targeting the phrase “TITLE at” works, and it works especially well in the above example. Even though every single one of the random samples I viewed from the 728 results from the [site:linkedin.com "financial advisor at" "greater new york city area" "public profile powered by"] search appeared to be profiles of people who are currently financial advisors, dropping “current” from the search string and strategy doesn’t always work so well.

For example, when you run this string on Bing…

site:linkedin.com “branch manager at bank of america” “greater new york city area” “public profile powered by”

… some results are of people who state they are currently a Branch Manager at Bank of America, but other results are returned of people who are currently doing something else, but had previously been a branch manager at Bank of America.

This is bound to happen given that we are no longer forcing the word “current” to be in a phrase along with the title we’re targeting. However, in some cases, as with the financial advisor search, this search approach can yield results with nearly all profiles having the target title as a current title.

One of the reasons for this is actually due to the fact that a great number of LinkedIn profiles are not very rich in content or complete. Many people join LinkedIn, add their current position, and then don’t ever modify it – this results in many searchable profiles for which there is only a current job, because no previous jobs were ever entered.

This is one small way in which LinkedIn’s often shallow data and many incomplete profiles actually works in your favor – if you’re trying to target people by current title and want to find the maximum number of available results without having to be limited by trying to use “current TITLE” in your strings.

What’s the Shortest Effective X-Ray String?

Looking at the “Public profile powered by” phrase in the search strings, I was curious to see if the entire phrase was even necessary to get good results.

I shaved the “public profile powered by” all the way down to just “powered.” It seems like the most unique term and unlikely to produce (m)any false positives.

site:linkedin.com “financial advisor at” “greater new york city area” powered

Over 42,000 estimated results.

-

That’s a lot of results – certainly more than the two previous searches. Of course, the 42,000+ is just an estimate and we can’t see past 1,000 results – but I decided to check the integrity of the results out to the maximum you can view (1,000).

As you can see from the image below, you can actually view 1,000 results, and impressively, most (but certainly not all) of the results appear to be all  profiles of people who are currently financial advisors – even out to the last page. That’s a significant improvement from my previous best Bing search which yielded 728 financial advisors.

Sweet.

As Irina Shamaeva has speculated, the Internet search engines obviously don’t index every element/word/phrase of LinkedIn profiles. However, it does appear that the word “powered” is indexed more than the entire phrase “public profile powered by.”

Is there a more simple and elegant search string structure for searching LinkedIn via an Internet search engine to find as many public profiles as possible than site:linkedin.com “TITLE/KEYWORD” “LOCATION PHRASE” powered? If so – please let me know!

Is Google Down and Out?

Going back to Google, we can use a “standard” LinkedIn X-Ray string to compare results with the above Bing search for the exact same parameters:

site:linkedin.com (inurl:in OR inurl:pub) -intitle:directory -inurl:dir -inurl:jobs “greater new york city area” “current * financial advisor”

1600 estimated results looks good, right?

Not so fast.

Notice the 4th result, Shannon Sweeney? He’s not currently a financial advisor:

Using the asterisk in the phrase “current * financial advisor” is not a flawless solution – it will yield false positive results.

Also, navigating through the results, you can see that they actually end at 479. Less than half of our short and sweet Bing X-Ray search of LinkedIn. Interesting, yes?

Can Google Return Good Results with a Short LinkedIn X-Ray String?

Then I was curious to see what Google would make of the short and sweet Bing LinkedIn X-Ray search string:

site:linkedin.com “financial advisor at” “greater new york city” powered

While Google estimates over 94,000 results – you can see from the first 10 that they are mostly directory results and not profiles. Blech!

To add insult to injury, if you navigate out to page 46 – there are actually only 457 results, which is less than half of what Bing returns (which are all profiles and not directory results!).

The Coup de Grace

And now, for my finishing move, I will unveil one of Bing’s (no longer) secret weapons – <insert dramatic music>- proximity search.

Irina brought to my attention via Twitter that Bing actually supports the near: operator. I wasn’t previously aware of this, as I haven’t historically used Bing that much (sorry MS folks), and I had never before heard of Bing supporting proximity search.

A quick bit of research returned this information directly from Microsoft, showing that the near: operator “constrains the distance between terms so that documents that contain instances of the specified terms within ten words of each other are returned before those that don’t.” Interestingly and importantly, that explanation technically leaves Bing the option to return some results in which the near: operator is not strictly obeyed.

Additionally, Bing gives you the ability to move beyond fixed proximity (i.e., near: = within 10 words) and into the realm of configurable proximity by adding a number to the operator, taking precise control over the distance. For example:  java near:4 develop

It is also important to know that the order of the terms when using the near: operator is also considered when Bing ranks results. In the above example, pages that contain “develop” 4 words or less after “java” would receive a greater boost in rank than pages in which “java” appears 4 words or less after “develop.” However, depending on the rest of the query, this does not necessarily mean that the former would be ranked higher than the latter.

In other words, Bing favors the original order of the query terms over the reversed order.

So why is this all a big deal?

Well, using Bing’s proximity search effectively allows you to target the current title “phrase” found in LinkedIn profiles, and this is a “cleaner” approach than using Google’s one-or-more-word wildcard asterisk. For example:

site:linkedin.com current near:2 “financial advisor” “greater new york city area” powered

Unlike all of my previous search experiments, we can be more assured that the results are going to adhere to the intent of the search, which is finding the phrase “Financial Advisor” precisely within 2 or fewer words of “Current.” Now, we know that there aren’t any words that separate these two on the LinkedIn profile – its actually a bullet, but this proximity search can be nearly guaranteed to return results where the current title phrase we’re targeting is intact.

Interestingly, even though Bing estimates over 1900 results, when you navigate through the results, you end at page 41 with 410 results. While that is more real results than my first “current financial advisor” search that returned 373, it is less than some of my other search experiments above.

I have my theories as to why this is the case, but I am curious to know what your thoughts are.

If you were curious (I was), here is the search narrowing the distance down to 1 word between the word “current” and “financial advisor:”

site:linkedin.com current near:1 “financial advisor” “greater new york city area” powered

361 real results.

LinkedIn X-Ray Search Summary

• Using Google to X-Ray LinkedIn and target current titles with the “current * TITLE” phrase isn’t foolproof. It will return some accurate results, but it does not return ALL available results, nor are all of the results accurate (current titles).
• You can use Bing or Yahoo to simply search for “current TITLE” and you will return some accurate results. As with Google, however, it will not find ALL available results. Unlike using Google’s “current * TITLE” search technique, all of the results will all be of people with the targeted current title.
• Using Bing to search LinkedIn with the phrase “TITLE at” is also an effective way of targeting current titles without being limited to searching for the word “current,” although it can also return some false positive results (past titles) as well.
• The shortest and most effective LinkedIn X-Ray string to find as many public profiles in a particular metro area as possible appears to be this string structure on Bing or Yahoo: site:linkedin.com “LOCATION PHRASE” “TITLE/KEYWORDS” Powered
• You can leverage Bing’s support of proximity search to target the current title phrase:  site:linkedin.com current near:1 “financial advisor” “greater new york city area” powered
• Being curious, questioning status quo and always asking, “I wonder what will happen if…” are critical keys to discovery and innovation!

Conclusion

Bing/Yahoo 1, Google 0.

From my testing, it appears that you can forsake Google and confidently use Bing (or Yahoo) for nearly all of your LinkedIn X-Ray searching needs. It certainly seems that Bing allows you to find a higher quantity of higher quality results, and you can get them with very short and effective search strings, as well as through the use of configurable proximity search, all without all of the non-profile results that Google returns and the annoying CAPTCHAs/you’re not human insults.

Which leaves me wondering – what is going on with Google’s search engine that causes it to return such garbage (non-profile) results when searching LinkedIn?

As a final note – I would never suggest using only one Internet search engine for all of your searching, for obvious reasons. Having said that, Bing has now become my search engine of choice for sourcing and recruiting research.

11/13/11 LinkedIn X-Ray Search Syntax Update 

I’ve received some comments about 1 year after writing this post and there have been some changes and discoveries with regard to using Bing and Google to X-Ray search LinkedIn to find public profiles.

As such, here are a couple of examples of updated X-Ray search string syntax – substitute your location phrase and use your own keywords/titles:

Updated Bing LinkedIn X-Ray Search Syntax/Format

site:linkedin.com java “project manager” “location greater new york city area” -dir

Updated Google LinkedIn X-Ray Search Syntax/Format

site:linkedin.com java “project manager” “location * greater new york city area” “contact settings”

When it comes to searching LinkedIn using Internet search engines such as Google or Yahoo, there are many different ways to construct your search string (“X-Ray” or otherwise) and get results.

Ultimately, the goal of any good sourcer or recruiter is to find all of the best available potential candidates that a particular source has to offer.

A short while ago, Gary Cozin sent me a link to an article recommending to “forget complex Boolean strings” when searching LinkedIn using Internet search engines.

I read the article and appreciated the advice to go with the easier, simpler, more elegant search solutions, as well as the suggestion to try “Public profile powered by.” I had never thought of taking that approach – but more on that later.

First, a Little X-Ray History

If you do some research online, you’ll find that the LinkedIn X-Ray search strings that experts in the industry were recommending for years looked something like this:

site:www.linkedin.com intitle:linkedin “current * test manager” -intitle:answers -intitle:updated -intitle:blog -intitle:directory -inurl:jobs -inurl:megite.com -intitle:profile -inurl:jobid

That string has 8 exclusions – effective, but far from simple and elegant.

A while ago, I came up with and recommended a simpler, more elegant approach to the LinkedIn X-Ray search that focused on inclusion rather than a long list of exclusions by specifically targeting profiles using (inurl:in OR inurl:pub), which allowed me to get away with only using 1 exclusion: -intitle:directory.

This approach yielded a simple, short and effective “core” X-Ray syntax of:

site:linkedin.com (inurl:in OR inurl:pub) -intitle:directory

Short and sexy, right?

And Then….

Sometime in April, many people (including myself) noticed that when running a “standard” LinkedIn X-Ray string with Google, that rather than returning the familiar results of individual LinkedIn profiles, results would come back organized by first or last name. Additionally, many noticed that jobs would come up at the top of the results.

I checked into the matter and suggested to add a couple of exclusions, in the form of -inurl:dir -inurl:jobs to get back to the desired results of individual LinkedIn profiles.

That worked, but my simple, short and effective “core” X-Ray syntax of site:linkedin.com (inurl:in OR inurl:pub) -intitle:directory got a little longer and uglier with the addition of -inurl:dir -inurl:jobs. I wasn’t particularly happy about that, but it seemed the only way to get rid of the new garbage, non-individual profile, results.

However, it’s still shorter and more elegant than the X-Rays of yore with massive multiple exclusions.

A New Approach

Going back to the idea of using “Public profile powered by” when using an Internet search engine to look for public LinkedIn profiles – I was intrigued by the concept of dropping the X-Ray string altogether and targeting a phrase that is found on every public LinkedIn profile.

It simply never occurred to me to try it, and I sincerely appreciate the novel approach.

Gary Cozin asked me what I thought of the idea. My first impression was that I found it interesting and I respected the mini-breakthrough in thought that produced it, but I told Gary that I needed to do some testing to be able to tell if it is as effective as other methods of searching for LinkedIn profiles on the web.

So I Performed Some Tests

First – remember that when doing any comparison testing of Internet searches , you have to configure them so that they return a manageable number of results – ideally a few hundred or less. Anything higher than that, and you can get into “estimate” territory.

Here is a simple comparison of the “Public profile powered by” vs. a “standard” X-Ray search on Google.

First up – the “Public profile powered by:”

Microsoft “Public profile powered by” “greater atlanta area” “software engineer” java

That yields 7 results. You have to click on “repeat the search with the omitted results included” to get to 103 results. If you click through to page 10 of the results, for some reason there are only really 100. But you get the point.

Next we have a “standard” X-Ray search with the same criteria:

site:linkedin.com (inurl:in OR inurl:pub) -intitle:directory -inurl:dir -inurl:jobs “greater atlanta area” Microsoft “software engineer” java

That yields 287 results. But not really (thanks Google!). If you click through the results pages, you’ll be stopped on page 24 for a total of 232 results.

In that one search comparison, there is a difference of over 100 results, and I didn’t see any duplicates or bad results from my sampling with the “standard” X-Ray.

As a side note, searching for the word “Microsoft” using Google to search LinkedIn will get you many results with hits of common Microsoft software (e.g., Office), as well as the abbreviation “MS,” which even gets hits of Master’s degrees (I found at least 1 instance of this). If you want to force Google to only return the word “Microsoft,” you have to use quotes or the plus (+) sign.

So What Causes the Difference in Results?

That’s a great question. The phrase “Public profile powered by” does seem to be on every public LinkedIn profile, so why would searching for it find fewer results, let alone produce any difference?

Honestly, I am not really sure. Irina Shamaeva has some ideas as to what could cause the difference in search results.

Maybe some people at Google could shed some light on the matter? <not holding my breath>

The Bottom Line

Regardless of why Google isn’t finding all of the available public LinkedIn profiles by searching for “Public profile powered by,” the bottom line is that the “standard” (inelegant and longer) X-Ray string finds more.

Even if the results gap wasn’t as dramatically large as I found in that one test scenario (I did find some larger and smaller results variations), the fact that the results are different AT ALL is what makes me concerned. I don’t like to miss any results.

To make sure you don’t miss any available search results, I strongly encourage you to do your own testing of the various ways to search LinkedIn using an Internet search engine using relevant search terms for whatever you typically look for.

While I love the simplicity and appreciate the approach of searching for public LinkedIn profiles by not having to use the lengthy site:linkedin.com (inurl:in OR inurl:pub) -intitle:directory -inurl:dir -inurl:jobs, I would never abandon the uglier, longer string at the expense of missing any available search results (not even 1!).

Some More Google Fun

Taking the approach of targeting a phrase common to every public LinkedIn profile a step further, I also experimented with searching for the phrases “Create a public profile” and “professionals already on LinkedIn.”

Here’s a comparison:

Microsoft “Public profile powered by” “greater atlanta area” “software engineer” java

Microsoft “Create a public profile” “greater atlanta area” “software engineer” java

Microsoft “professionals already on LinkedIn” “greater atlanta area” “software engineer” java

Approximately 103, 124, and 150 results respectively.

Did that get your attention?

Why are they different at all, when all three phrases appear on all public LinkedIn profiles? I don’t have the answer.

If Google allows you to click on a cached result without apologizing for thinking you’re not human (am I bitter?), you can clearly see Google indexes the other phrases:

So What about Yahoo and Bing?

Everyone has their search engine preferences, and my first choice has always been Google. However, with the recent changes in LinkedIn X-Ray search results as well as the issue of Google thinking everyone has suddenly become a malicious bot sending automated queries to their servers, I’m looking more at Yahoo and Bing.

Interestingly though, as Irina reminded me recently, Yahoo is giving up their search technology and in the near future will be using Microsoft’s. So technically – Yahoo search may not yield any different results than Bing in the future. Enjoy the results while you can.

Anyhoo…Yahoo does currently seem to do a much better job of searching public LinkedIn profiles with the phrase of “Public profile powered by:”

Microsoft “Public profile powered by” “greater atlanta area” “software engineer” java

416 results! But don’t get too excited – if you click through to the end/last page (to keep Yahoo honest), you end up with 208.

Which is less than the 232 we found using a “standard” X-Ray string on Google.

Interestingly, Yahoo also does a better job of getting consistent results when using other phrases such as “professionals already on LinkedIn” (210 results, if you were curious).

What about Bing? Bing apparently doesn’t like searches like Microsoft “Public profile powered by” “greater atlanta area” “software engineer” java.

Final Thoughts

There is always more than one way to run a search, and there is no single “right way” to find people. Use multiple approaches, and always test them to understand and appreciate differences.

When searching any source, your goal as a sourcer or recruiter is to find all of the best candidates the source has to offer. Finding some people isn’t enough.

Regarding search string length when X-Ray searching LinkedIn – if you’re worried about the 32 word search limit that Google imposes, I’d argue you’re not taking into account that a large percentage of people with LinkedIn profiles don’t even flesh them out with (m)any keywords.

Always appreciate, understand and respect how the non-sourcer / recruiter / HR professional uses LinkedIn…most don’t use it as a full-blown resume.

So if you’re loading up your Google/LinkedIn strings with anywhere close to 32 words (e.g., site:linkedin.com (inurl:in OR inurl:pub) -intitle:directory -inurl:dir -inurl:jobs “greater atlanta area” “software engineer” java unix oracle linux application design develop C++ MySql J2EE Lead Senior SQL data javascript hibernate blah blah blah…), you are actually making it impossible to find all of the qualified candidates on LinkedIn.

Contemplate this on the tree of woe.

Have you ever been searching the Internet with Google to find resumes or LinkedIn profiles, and instead of getting your search results, you get a nice apology from Google saying that your computer or network might be sending automated queries and can’t process your request?

In the past week alone I have received a number of inquiries from curious sourcers and recruiters as to what to do about this.

Typically, this notice is accompanied by a CAPTCHA that will allow you to enter some characters to prove that you’re human.

You are human, right?

Performing a lot of X-Ray searches of LinkedIn profiles seems to trigger Google to ask me for proof of humanity.

However, just the other day I was searching for resumes online, and when I clicked to see the “cached” version of a search result, I got a different Google apology. This one didn’t even allow me to prove my humanity. Dang!

If you choose to click on “Google Help“, you’ll see that they advise you to #1 Check for malware on your computer, #2 Contact your network administrator, and #3 If the problem persists, have your network administrator contact Google.

Apparently, sending automated queries of any sort to Google is against their Terms of Service, which states that among other things, it is unacceptable to use software to Google to determine how a website or webpage ranks on Google for various queries, ‘Meta-searching’ Google, and performing ‘offline’ searches on Google.

Last time I checked, manually searching for resumes and LinkedIn profiles isn’t any of the above.

What To Do

Because I get stopped by Google’s CAPTCHA quite frequently, I did actually contact Google, inasmuch as you can contact Google by filling out their form. Not sure if anything came of that as I have never heard back (not that I was expecting to).

However, what I have found is that simply clearing my browser’s cookies gets this annoying search result interruption to go away, at least for a while. You can be selective in clearing specific cookies or you can delete them all – which will remove your saved settings for sites you’ve previously visited. Small price to pay in order to get your search results from Google.

You could also abandon Google altogether and switch to Bing, which doesn’t make you suffer through proving you’re human. Plus, Bing is actually a much better way to X-Ray search LinkedIn.

I hope that helps you if you ever got blocked by Google. Let me know if you have any other suggestions/fixes for this issue.

Thanks!