LinkedIn Advanced Operators Combined With Boolean Strings

[Alexander Fedossov]

Did you ever ask yourself how to use LinkedIn's advanced operators combined with boolean strings the right way?

Glen Cathey from booleanblackbelt.com already gave some examples in his article on LI advanced operatorshere:

But there seemed to be problems regarding the right syntax:

(ctitle:engineer OR ctitle:admin OR ctitle:administrator)

This one doesn't work at all.

ctitle:(engineer OR admin OR administrator)

This one does work but LI does not to do what it's supposed to. LI interprets this query as
OR admin OR administrator ), engineer instead of engineer OR admin OR administrator

After some days of experimenting I found out that you have to replace the parentheses with inverted commas in order to get LI to work the right way.

ctitle:"engineer OR admin OR administrator"

I know it contradicts boolean logic but that's how it works :-)

Alexander

P.S. Visit our Blog http://www.personalberater-blog.de later today if you want to read a german ;-) article regarding the LInkedIn Topic.

Please find a picture of the results page below.

[gary cozin]

Yes -

I had seen Glen's article & have been using it. Glen did mention somewhere (may have been on Twitter if you follow him) about the inverted quotes/commas that you need to be aware of. However, I believe if you search within LinkedIN you only get 100 results. You could run another just changing the string slightly to get additional results. But if you x-ray LinkedIN using the 'site' command in Google - you can get up to 1,000 results - But using both would be ideal as you can control more definite parameters in LI with their search commands.

Glen's full article on searching within LinkedIN & outside of LI is here:
http://www.booleanblackbelt.com/2009/02/free-linkedin-search-intern...

Gary

[Glen Cathey]

Gary,
You're right (as you usually are!) - I have commented on using proper quotation marks when searching LinkedIn.

Alexander,
I love your investigative work - trial and error is essentially the scientific method, and how most things are uncovered - well done!

LinkedIn's advanced operators for ccompany: and ctitle: don't "behave" very well, even when using quotation marks as you suggest. For example, look through some of your results for your suggested search string (as I did for results in the US) and you will notice that the search terms are highlighted not only in the current title field - but in many cases I found that the search terms are highlighted in past titles, and even in the "body" of profiles as well - so it's quite difficult to tell exactly what's going on when using those operators, even without trying to search for multiple current titles or current companies.

There is definitely a difference between the results returned from these two different strings:
ctitle:(engineer OR admin OR administrator)
ctitle:"engineer OR admin OR administrator"

However, because the search terms in the results are highlighted in past titles as well as in the body of profiles, it's hard to tell exactly what LinkedIn makes of the second search string.

Please see the attached screenshot files as evidence, showing search terms highlighted in non-current title areas.

Also - while experimenting with searches, I ran the simple ctitle:engineer - and on the first page of my results I even found 2 that did NOT have the word "engineer" in the current title at all, yet "engineer" was highlighted in past positions. Having seen this, I am not sure if LinkedIn has been making changes to their support of these operators. Remember - I contacted LinkedIn and they claimed they did not support the advanced operators for location search, but I routinely get them to work properly.

Although the ctitle: and even the ccompany: operators appear to be returning odd results, I did just try the industry: operator to test this search - industry:"Airlines/Aviation" and this worked perfectly on the results I reviewed - they all only highlighted "Airlines/Aviation" in the industry field. So some of LinkedIn's advanced operators appear to "behave" properly. :-)

Due to the inconsistency of the individual operator results, this will take a little more investigative work to figure out - let me know if you are able to isolate results to current titles only, and I will do the same.

Thanks!