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:
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.
- Topics:
- New LinkedIn Features,
- Search
Comments
I’m so delighted to see this feature being incorporated in linkedin. This makes searching & networking more efficient, easy and less time consuming. Thumbs up
The people search box displays results that are covered by the mid-rec flash ad. This is how you fix it:
http://www.meydad.com/2008/11/24/tip-how-to-send-flash-elements-to-the-back/
Very cool! Being able to customize your own view on the search results is excellent! Cheers! Josh at pmStudent.com
Very cool set of features, but in what way is this a “search platform”? You don’t mention APIs or 3rd party extensibility anywhere in your post.
LinkedIn just gets better and better.
Well done – being able to customize an intuitive “fill-in” seacrh module, then sort according to relevance, plus being able to initiate an action directly from the search page – very, very cool.
i think feature education might be more easily explained via slides, rather than video… the user can self-drive the info, rather than having to wait for video timing.
if you use video, i’d suggest keeping it under 60 seconds. 4.5 minutes is rather long, unless it’s incredibly tight.
btw, i think the hidden feature here is “People Alerts via Email”… most folks won’t realize that’s the main benefit via the current blog post title, especially since you pre-announced the change to people search previously.
i almost didn’t catch this until i saw the tooltip on the feature itself (nice in-place feature education there, good job
Thanks to everyone for your feedback!
Hi Dave,
We normally try to keep our user videos down to 3 minutes (max) and on average 2 minutes, but this was probably our longest to date.
Moving forward, we’ll continue to aim for shorter videos. And, thanks for the feedback.
Mario from LinkedIn
I’m a new user of LinkedIn, perhaps three weeks, so the instructional video’s are helpful. I’m looking for a wordpress expert right now for my company http://www.kmocoffee.com and if someone leaves a comment on my personal Blog http://www.bobjohnson.wordpress.com I’ll get it.
This is a great update to the service.
Is there any plans to make Events more relevant?
LinkedIN repeatedly proves itself worthy of my praise. Kudos again.
#1 on my current wish-list is to make your expanded address book details available in your iPhone app. I realize the expanded address book details are still a beta feature, but by their very nature, their value is exponentially enhanced by being accessible via mobile device… I say, as I type this from my iPhone.
Your search feature is broken.
18.03 GMT, 26-11-08
Search is failing for me regularly.
@Ed and @Nick,
Search is working for all of our users. Please let me know if you’re still having issues accessing it.
Mario from LinkedIn
No API..? The search feature is unreliable too. It has failed me a few times
@David,
Not sure what exactly it is that you’re referring to. Could you please clarify?
Mario from LinkedIn
The search just crashes
“Sorry, we can’t display this page right now.
Something unexpected has gone wrong. Please wait a few seconds and try again by hitting the reload button.
We apologize for the inconvenience. An error report has been filed and our team is working on fixing the problem.
In the meantime…
“
@Naveen,
I’ve forwarded your issue to the product team. Moving forward, feel free to check out our customer support site:
http://linkedin.custhelp.com/
Hope this helps.
Mario from LinkedIn
I have been using the search function and have experienced several times where the page is donw…thanks for the reminder to use customer service link to report the problem.
Your implementation of the search is very nice! One thing I miss is the Next and Previous navigation capability.
Alex
thanks for the reminder to use customer service
One of the useful things about the original search function was being able to sort your connections in order of THEIR number of connections, from most to least – which gave you an immediate sense of who your best connectors are.
You were able to do that if, on the Advanced Search screen, you left all the fields blank except for the one that allowed you to choose how you wanted your sort done. On that one you choose by degrees away from you, which would put all your 1st degree connections at the top of the list starting with the people who had the highest number of connections.
That ability is no longer available (that I’ve seen) in the new search function. It should be. It was very helpful.
Some nice features here, but when are you going to address improving the location search? Having only two options — anywhere in the world or in a single zip code (with max 100-mile radius) — is not helpful for people who might want to search within a metro area, entire state, or individual country, for example. This is functionality that other job search sites (and other types of sites, e.g. real estate) have been able to offer for years.
In July 2007, one of your product managers stated there would be at least some enhancements coming within a month. None of those have been implemented yet.
http://www.linkedin.com/answers/using-linkedIn/ULI/67290-1373509?browseIdx=3&sik=1230162307109&goback=%2Eamq
I’d be interested in knowing LinkedIn’s thoughts on why this is such a low priority.
Very Nice! features that we can use. I agree we need more regional search capabilities. Would like to know it this will be implemented as we have done on our site. Heck we even share the same jobs database.
http://jobs.aplace4people.com
http://www.aplace4people.com
The best free people search engine on the web. People search is in gigantic demand right now (30% of all searches on Google & Yahoo are people search related, and that number is growing) because in this day and age we’re trying to protect ourselves and our children as much as we can from predators and other nefarious people–and as employers, it is now possible to use the Internet to weed out prospective employees who will not be good for your company.
I love the way the tools are integrated into the pages, just wanted to let you know…
Robby
I agree, this search / relevance is very useful.
Even though the post is almost a year old the search uses some cross-referencing features to list other possible results.
Google did that a couple months ago with their Wonder Wheel:)
Scott
Search Engine Optimization Made Easy for Blogs
Good job. Keep it up.
The new search platform makes it great for better searches and refining potential business partners.
Funny to look back at old posts like this.. nice to see where we’ve come in even such a short time.