LinkedIn has improved its search technology by adding new filters to make it easier for the professional networking site's users to find who and what they are looking for. These filters help users whittle down their queries based on: current company and past company, location, relationship, location, industry, school, and profile languages. The site now features a new "Refine By" module that will include a list of the most relevant facets based on query results.
LinkedIn has improved its search technology by adding new filters to make it
easier for the professional networking site's more than 50 million users to
find new contacts.
LinkedIn users need to be aware of these faceted search filters,
which are generated on the fly based on users' query results and appear in the new Refine By module.
These filters help users whittle down their queries based
on: current company and past company, location, relationship, location, industry,
school, and profile languages.
"The filters are generated in real time for every
query by parsing all matching results and extracting the most important
attributes,"
said LinkedIn Senior Product Manager Esteban Kozak, who shepherds the company's
search efforts. "We then present those to you in an intuitive interface
that lets you select one or multiple filters per facet."
In a demonstration video, Kozak found experts in the oil
exploration industry. He typed "drilling" into the search box, and
saw 22,900 contacts. To narrow this down, he then chose Oil and Energy from the
Industry facet, whittling the options down to 12,200 contacts.
He further pared the search to by location, picking
Venezuela. Finally, he picked U.S. companies -- Halliburton and Chevron -- and
got seven contacts, a much more manageable number.
This is a vast improvement over LinkedIn's previous search,
helping users improve the needle-in-the-haystack factor of finding valuable
contacts.
Faceted search filters come more than a year after
LinkedIn
rolled out its new people search technology, which let users search for contacts
by name, company, school, language and other categories.
In his blog post, Kozak said this launch almost doubled overall
search activity on LinkedIn. This is no surprise; search on LinkedIn was
generally poor before Kozak and his team launched people search. Expect search
to increase with these new filters.
Will faceted search bring new users to LinkedIn? No, but
it will ensure the existing users have better opportunities for finding
relevant, professional contacts.
The move also comes a month after LinkedIn
inked a deal with Twitter to enable users to tweet their status from LinkedIn
and pipe their Twitter tweets to LinkedIn from Twitter.
The company in November
also formally
launched its development platform to let software programmers put LinkedIn's
profile content into their business applications and Web sites.
Email
Print
