LinkedIn Geo: “Mapping” the Network
Recently, you may have noticed some small changes in the way LinkedIn handles geographic locations, including an enhanced People Search for the US, UK and Canada. With this week’s release, we’ve significantly improved this effort by migrating 14 other countries to this new system, including Germany, France and India. With this expansion, we’ve also integrated geography into various features throughout the site. Let’s have a look…
Jobs Radius Search
Now, when you search for jobs around a specific postal code, you’ll find all jobs within a 25 mile (40 km) radius of that postal code. On the advanced job search page, you can narrow or broaden this radius depending on your commuting requirements. This is a significant improvement from our previous system, especially outside of the US, and we hope job seekers will find this feature useful.
Improved regions
We also changed the way we display regions throughout the site. The Profile, Network Stats, Services, My Connections and Answers pages have been enhanced to display more specific regions (outside the US). You’ll notice people in your network now live in ‘London’, ‘Paris’ and ‘Bangalore’ instead of ‘the UK’, ‘France’, and ‘India’. Have fun exploring your newly “mapped” network!
People Radius Search (For Premium Members)
Finally, we’ve also modified our People Search to include the same radius search ability that we added to Jobs Search. This feature was widely requested by our premium members-especially recruiters–so we’re rewarding them with exclusive access to this powerful People Search functionality-they can now search as small as a 10 mile (15 km) radius. Basic LinkedIn members can still limit People Searches by distance, only the radius is fixed to 30 miles (50 km) in Europe and 50 miles (80 km) elsewhere.
So there you have it: LinkedIn Geo. Be on the lookout for other “geo-enhanced” features in the future!
LinkedIn Geo: Made possible by…
We’d also like to collectively thank geonames.org for their generous donation of international postal code data, as it made our job of mapping postal codes to latitude/longitude coordinates for over 14 million members much easier.
And most importantly, I’d like to thank you in advance for your feedback. Feel free to suggest improvements to LinkedIn Geo by commenting on this blog post.
Nick is a Principal Software Engineer who’s better known at LinkedIn as the reigning Guitar Hero and Puzzle Bobble champion. All challengers are welcome to bring it on, anytime :)
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Peter Lewis September 19th, 2007
Don’t forget to add Australia to your Geocode work !! Large numbers of Australians (on a per capita basis) are signing up to LinkedIn and its even getting some local press coverage. Also many jobs posted by local headhunters
Huzaifa September 19th, 2007
This is a useful feature – it has some inaccuracies though – I am from Pune (also written as Poona), India, which is a major city and has an international airport, close to Mumbai (Bombay). However, my location is mentioned as Satara, which is much smaller and not very close to Pune.
Please amend this flaw……
Peter September 19th, 2007
I’d rather have none of this compared to the inaccuracy it gives now. According to LinkedIn, I’m in the ‘Brussels area’ in Belgium, which is totally incorrect (Gent = 9000, Brussels = 1000).
Why not integrate with google maps?
Sergio da Cunha Nicácio September 20th, 2007
indiquei 5 contatos, mas não sei se foram comunicados que oeu os indiquei. Quero ter relacionamento e informação sobre publicidade e propaganda, marketing e oportunidades de pequenos negócios independentes, pessoas de Portugal e países de línguas portuguesa, espanhola, castelhano e Italiana e Guianas.
Peter Bakker September 20th, 2007
I have to break the news but for the UK the GEO search is best turned off. I tried to use it and the resukts were dreadful. I have a hard time now finding position in london while if I dont use the geo function I can find plenty.
John Beckley September 20th, 2007
Hi, we are a web design company in the Canary Islands Spain. I would like to get all of our clients and business partners signing up to linkedin, do you have Linkedin GEO for Spain?
rob September 20th, 2007
Would it be possible for you guys to do a mashup of Google Maps and all the people in my network – maybe making first degree connections one color, second another, etc.?
r.
Jim Mannfeld September 20th, 2007
I have noticed over the past several days that the job search fucntionality is displaying only a minimal number of avaialable positions. Even after expanding the search radius minimal positions are diplayed. This is primarily related to those positions returned from the “WEB” search.
Nick Dellamaggiore September 21st, 2007
Thank you all for your feedback. International location search is a feature that relies particularly heavily on your feedback because it’s built on top of an open-source, third-party dataset (geonames.org) containing more than 600,000 records (too many to check individually!). We’re working to improve a few issues. The first is how we display regions for international countries. We originally created regions by mapping postal codes to the nearest large city. This makes sense for some international countries, but not necessarily for all. We will be adjusting accordingly in the next few weeks. The second is adding postal codes that are missing from the dataset based on your reports (this particularly seems to be a problem for the Great Britain). Finally, international job search will improve over the next few weeks as we geo-code existing jobs already in the system. Please keep the feedback coming.
Tony Karrer September 25th, 2007
This would be extremely helpful in finding local experts on topics across the broader search. In Los Angeles or Bay Area getting people who are 50 miles away doesn’t do you much good.
Tony Karrer September 25th, 2007
whoops I just saw that it was for Premium. That hurts.