Announcing LinkedIn’s New Search Platform

I am writing today to announce the full release of LinkedIn’s new search platform to over 31 million LinkedIn users.

The new search platform at LinkedIn is redefining the way professionals go about finding talent, business partners, customers or a former colleague.

Here is a video that summarizes some of the key features in the new search experience, followed by key elements of the new functionality:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_mAJ-Jg534&fmt=18]

Many more ways to find people

Our user’s profiles include a wealth of structured data that enables powerful search refinement options. You can refine search results by entering data in more than a dozen different fields that range from “name” and “company” to “school” and “language”.

Expanded search space

We eliminated the need to switch tabs if you want to see results with professionals from outside your network. The new search will retrieve the most relevant professionals from the entire LinkedIn community.

Relationship matters

One of the most important factors in ranking search results is the searcher’s network. This means that every matching search result is evaluated based on who is executing the search. The end result is a personalized relevance algorithm that places the professionals that are most likely to be of interest at the top of the first search results page.

Powerful productivity tools

We synthesized over a thousand pieces of feedback and analyzed data from over a billion search queries. We leveraged the research to design powerful tools to help our users be more productive when looking for the right professional. Given below is a list of key functionality that the feature launches with today:

•    “In Common” is a new field in search results that lets you find what connections and groups you share with the selected user.

•    We’ll allow you to save searches and receive reminders by email if we find that someone new meets your search criteria.

•    We now offer two views as part of the search results redesign: basic and expanded. In addition, we also let you customize your own view. You’ll be able to add or remove fields from search results based on what makes the most sense for your search.

•    We know how hard typing people’s names is. We hear it from our users and also see it in the data. As a result, we built a robust spell checker for names. We’ll expand the spell checker to other type of keywords very soon.

•    We also saw in the data that many of you use search to get to your connections quickly. In order to make it more efficient, we developed a type-ahead widget that recommends connections as you type from any people search box.

Explore LinkedIn’s New People Search

These are some of feature enhancements you’ll see rolled out over the next few days. We hope this augments your productivity and we’d love to hear your feedback, questions and suggestions.