LinkedIn has a launched a revamped version of its search engine that aims to streamline the business social network’s most oft-used features. Most of the new features revolve around people-search (not surprising given the network’s theme), and while there isn’t anything particularly exciting from the user’s perspective the changes make the engine significantly more convenient (and will hopefully help the recently unemployed get back on their feet that much faster).
Many of the changes are subtle: as you begin typing names, LinkedIn will offer an autocompleted list of possible matches, similar to Facebook’s search. The engine also streamlines advanced search by presenting options in a more accessible menu (some of the features were previously available, but buried so that most users never found them). The engine is also making use of LinkedIn’s vast repository of structured data, automatically detecting when a search term is related to a name or to a person’s company and position.
One of the search engine’s most powerful new additions is persistent search, which allows users to effectively set up alerts notifying them when there is an addition to a company’s executive roster, or when an appealing job candidate is up for grabs (the feature will likely be a boon for headhunters). Before now there have been a few ways to create similar notifications (like Yotify, which we covered in September), but this is the first time that LinkedIn has integrated this functionality.
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Great news. Thanks. I will include a link to this on my blog under resources and mention this feature in my white paper, LinkedIn for Job Search. http://tinyurl.com/6omlgz.
I am turning you in to my bank, and blasting your non-purchase charges that you are stealling from my acc ount from Big Fish Games and I am also maying Yahoo and other internet sponsors aware of your theft. I want resolution by getting my money back into my account immediatel. You will be hearing formally from me.
Crap the what?
I love how in the demo they are trying to recruit an engineer away from Yahoo! - Y! can’t catch a break!
Linkedin need to catch up with their own development. Their application platform is still plagued with errors. But one thing for sure, their whole site reminds me of MySpace.
You refer to being able to search on company data with this feature, but this remains poor. LinkedIn is still a horrible place to be looking for company information, because although it indirectly lists many millions of companies, it holds no real data on any of them. Until it switches away from a personal focus this will remain the case.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
Finally! I love LinkedIn, but this has been my top complaint about it for a long time. I was worried they were spending all their time building out support for apps, and wouldn’t bother fixing the search. Glad to see they can walk and chew gum.
Yes, same here. I had a real hard time finding people and companies with their old search. Glad it was changed and I love the new features.
I don’t know, we had most of these features for years now in Blogtronix for our Enterprise Social Networking, they are trying to catch up
There Still Number One !!!
PeopleSearches.com
http://www.PeopleSearches.com
PeopleSearches and Linkedin are of different focus. Anyway, PeopleSearches cannot let me search outside US…so it is not PEOPLE searches. Thanks to Linkedin, getting my CV done is a breeze
We @ JobsByRef.com have these feature for quite sometime now…LinkedIn as a site is becoming like MySpace the screens are getting cluttered. Not the same LinkedIn that I used to like before. But good to know that they are making improvements.
LinkedIn gets better!
Oh btw
Check out the new look JobsTAXI at http://www.jobstaxi.com
New Jobs. HUGE Inc. Starbucks. Facebook. Puma North America Inc. Ignition Entertaiment.
this is a nice set of features, however both you folks & LinkedIn buried the lede, which should have been: “People Search Alerts by Email Weekly”
I notice that everyone who is claiming that the functionality isn’t any good are pimping their own site as the solution!
I use LinkedIn because it’s got millions of people and is truly world-wide (rather than just the USA). These two completely outweigh that fact that the company search functionality isn’t as good as others.
Here is next generation professional networking site. MyVishwa.com - “We Create Time”. Check out the website http://www.MyVishwa.com . MyVishwa.com
Interesting, I had just had a discussion about a similar feature using a Fuzzy Matching to perform persistent searches over the LinkedIn or other Social/Business Networking database.
LinkedIn had this example to search for when their new search came in:
“Vice President at Google”
and the search returned nothing, looks like they didn’t try their search before putting this example query up
Not mentioned, but interesting nonetheless, is that the search upgrade is open-source Lucene under the hood, just as MySpace opted to use Lucene for its own search upgrade. Nice to see even more open source as the foundation for Web 2.0.
Linkedin have to login before search, but I want it have not to login for search people.
Linkedin does have a decent people search ability but only across its own landscape. So it can be difficult to find people outside of their member base. This is similar to sites like reunion.com and classmates that are niche.
But then again that’s the case with free sites its hard to get data that spans a larger database without having to pay for it.