In November 2008, we rolled out the new LinkedIn Search platform after many months of design and technical work.  Listening to the LinkedIn community is extremely important to us, and search is an application that millions of LinkedIn users depend on to get their jobs done everyday.

It has only been a little over a month since the full launch, but the results of that effort have been amazing.  We’re already seeing a huge increase in the number of searches on the site on a daily basis.  As more and more people use the platform, they are discovering more of the more advanced features built into LinkedIn search.

In 2007 I wrote a popular blog post called 5 Tips on How to Search LinkedIn Like a Pro which walked through some of the basics of Advanced Search and how to use advanced features like Boolean search.  These features are extremely powerful, and are fully supported in our new search platform.

However, for real power users, our old search interface had a limitation:  you had to use the actual Advanced Search form to target specific fields for your queries.  Not any more.

The new LinkedIn Search allows users to easily target specific fields directly from the search results page:

This makes it incredibly easy to iterate through your search, adding more specific terms and fields to help narrow your search, which is crucial to finding just the right people among an audience of 33 million professionals (and growing).

However, we know that real power users always want to go even faster.  And to go faster, you need to move beyond the graphical user interface, and be able to control your search directly from the query box itself.

Now you can. The new LinkedIn search platform allows any query that can be executed from the user interface to also be executed straight from the query box using the new advanced search operators.

For example, let’s say that you wanted to search for designers who used to work at Apple or Google.

You could type

designer AND (Apple OR Google)

into the LinkedIn search box.  That would give you every person who has the keyword “designer” in their profile, and either the keyword “Apple” or “Google”.

That’s a good query, but it will find people who have the keyword “Apple” or “Google” in their profile for other reasons.  For example, maybe they never worked at Apple, but they have training and skills with Apple products.  You can refine this with the “Modify Your Results” box, but that requires a large number of clicks and edits.

Now, with the new Advanced Search Operators, you can skip those steps and execute your query right the first time, straight from the search box.

Just type:

designer pcompany:’Apple OR Google’

The advanced search operator “pcompany:” tells the search engine to only look for the terms “Apple” or “Google”  within the past companies field on the LinkedIn profile.   This way, you’ll only see people who actually used to work at either Apple or Google.

With the new advanced search operator functionality, you can target first name, last name, current position, company, school, or any field supported by the LinkedIn search engine.  A complete list of the fields supported is located on the LinkedIn Learning Center.  We support fifteen advanced search operators already – more are planned in 2009.

We’ll follow up here on the blog with more great search functionality in the coming weeks.  Now go out and query like a Pro!

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.

I’d like to announce today the launch of our new search platform, currently released to a small percentage of our LinkedIn users. In addition, a certain percentage of the remaining users can explore the new search experience by simply clicking on the “Try LinkedIn’s new People Search” link at the top of search results pages.

As the largest global professional network, we’ve had the privilege of having millions of users enter over a billion professional search queries, and we’ve been working hard to build a much more robust professional people search engine. We interviewed lots of users and aggregated thousand of pieces of feedback. The end result is a completely redesigned search experience aimed at making it easier and faster to find the most relevant professionals that you’re looking for.

Here is a quick summary of the new features that will be phased out to all of our users in the coming months:

1. Unified search results:

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

2. More powerful relevance algorithm:

The new relevance sort not only takes into account keyword relevance but also leverages both the professional graph and the rich profile data to ensure that the most relevant professionals are always shown at the top of your search results page.

3. Redesigned search results page:

Speaking of the search results page, we’ve redesigned this page from the ground up to make it more readable and actionable. This includes a new streamlined look, the ability to refine you searches from a new “Modify your search” module on the right rail, easily accessible sorts and views, and the ability to take actions from the results page as you mouse over results.

4. In Common:

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

5. Saved Searches:

This is one of the most requested features. We’ll allow you to save searches and very soon we’ll let you get reminders over email if we find someone new that meets your criteria.

6. Views:

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

7. Spell check:

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.

8. Type-ahead for connections:

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.

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We’ll be testing all of these features over the next few weeks as we fine tune them for full release.  Stay tuned for more here, as these improvements mark just the beginning in helping your professional people search.