Answers to the 10 questions

[Irina Shamaeva]

Here are the answers. We will discuss them as part of my webinar "Boolean Strings Made Easy" at noon EST on Feb 1st.

1. If you want to only find profiles for people from the UK in LinkedIn, searching from Google, what would be the best search string?
Answer: use site:uk.linkedin.com as part of your string

2. Some people include the symbol @ in their searches for email addresses on Google. If you use the symbol @ in your search string on Google and then use the same string but change @to ?, will the results be different?
Answer: no difference.

Bonus: the same question but substitute @ for $
Answer: in some cases $ means something to Google (find out!)

3. If you search on Google using the word manager as part of your string and then use –manager thus excluding the results with the word; could it be that some web pages come up in both searches?

Answer: you may get the word management in both cases. (Look into auto-stemming on Google)

4. If someone invites you on LinkedIn, you accept the invitation and later on you wonder how many connection the person has, is there a way to find out?

Answer. If someone has over 500 connections, you can find out exactly how many by going back to the accepted invitation.

5. How many results max would you see when you search for:

1) people on LinkedIn using the people search - 100
2) people in a LI group - 500
3) something on Google - 1000
4) something on Bing - 1000
5) something on Yahoo - 1000
(or is there a limit for some of these?)

6. Can you use the operator NOT (capitalized) on
1) Google - no
2) Bing - yes

7. If you are a member of LinkedIn, in which searches can you use the Boolean operators AND OR NOT?

Answer: any search

8. On the twitter home page, there’s a search box. What string(s) would you use in this box to find recent tweets about recruiting in the UK that contain links?

Answer: 

recruiting UK filter:links 

9. Suggest a search string on Google to find the ultimate answer to the Universe - without clicking on the results!

Answer: the string is:

"ultimate answer to the Universe"