The Internet Sourcing Community

is this string a double negative?

In a space of tuning search strings up, I saw this search string and I think it's a flop...

Yes or No?

("account rep"* OR "account manager"* OR "territory manager"* OR "account specialist"* OR "sales rep"* OR "business development"* OR "salesman"*)

Based on the quotation marks (exact phrases of more than one word) and what they are meant to do in addition to the asterix (highlight any word that begins with the root/stem of the word truncated by the asterisk) and the nature of why we use that it seems like these would be working against one another....

also isn't there are wise rule for must searches not to load more than 4 titles specifically?

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Permalink Reply by Adam Wiedmer on April 15, 2010 at 9:04am

No I don't think so. You start to run into trouble when multiple titles use the same root word. So, a candidate may list themselves as a "Account Manager" or an "Account Executive", but you wouldn't want to just search for the work "Account" because then you get all kinds of miscellaneous information.

I'm not sure about the asterix syntax use, it depends where you are running this search, but the above search implies that "account rep" OR "account representative" are acceptable matches, whereas the word "Account" by itself is not pulled back.

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Permalink Reply by Kameron Swinton on April 15, 2010 at 5:37pm

This string does not work as intended because the * won't stem on most search engines and in places that it does it won't stem anything inside the quotes. On Google the * is not used to stem words, but rather to take the place of words. For example, "Director * Sales" will return Director of Global Sales, Director of Regional Sales, etc.

Monster will let you stem words using the asterisk, however, it will not stem anything inside quotation marks as it is looking for an exact phrase. In this case you may be better suited using proximity searching using NEAR. Also, I know Gary Cozin has a great search for sales and biz dev folks. You may want to search on here or message him.

-kameron