LinkedIn and the Yahoo! Open Search effort

Jack Chou Mar 13, 2008

Today, Yahoo! announced their intention to aggressively support semantic web standards. At LinkedIn, we've been excited to work closely with Amit Kumar and others at Yahoo! in leveraging their Open Search platform.

In the coming months, Yahoo! search results will display LinkedIn Public Profiles in a richer and more compelling format. (example below)

What does it mean for the LinkedIn User?

LinkedIn is all about letting you control and promote your brand identity as a professional. We want to help you be found by others in ways that will help you professionally – whether it's reconnecting with old colleagues, getting contacted by business leads, or hearing about that next great career opportunity.

A key part of that is allowing our members to maintain customizable public profiles that are indexed by the top search engines – thus making sure that anyone looking for you via Google or Yahoo! search will find you. Yahoo! Open Search allows us to take this functionality to the next level. The more information you expose on your profile, the easier it will be for initiatives such as Yahoo's Open Search to display that when you're searched for.

And because you can control the details included in your public profile, you’re in complete control over the information that shows up here. In fact, your data won't be displayed in the above format unless you customize your public profile and claim your custom public profile URL. Go ahead and establish your online brand by fine-tuning your public profile settings on LinkedIn (links below)

Two easy ways to enhance your online brand

Modify your LinkedIn public profile settings

Claim your LinkedIn public profile URL

Furthermore, because we’re already publishing content using microformats like hResume, this type of rich data and functionality is available to anyone who wants to consume it. So we fully expect other search engines and tools to make use of machine-readable data already included in our public profiles.

At a broader level, this collaboration is another demonstration of our ongoing efforts to support open and innovative standards at LinkedIn. As the web evolves in new and exciting directions (whether they be Google OpenSocial and application platforms, data portability or the Semantic Web), our goal as a company is to evolve rapidly.

This post wouldn't be complete without mention of my colleagues: Jimmy Lim, Elliot Shmukler, Steve Ganz and Jay Kreps, whose contributions make this possible.

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