LinkedIn introduced on July 15, 2009. This has been launched rather quietly and it appears to be still be in the test mode as they have a disclaimer at the bottom of the page:
“
You are testing our new dynamic search refinements. Opt out or Send us your feedback.”
This is quite user friendly with the advanced search for people or references (the reference search has only 1 field for companies) and the people search multiple facets: keywords, name, title, company, school, industries, groups, relationship, interested in, language, recommendations and joined. You can set the search by relevance, relationship, relationship & recommendations, connections or keywords as well as your view basic or expanded. (expanded shows current and past work). I have read that you would need to “opt in” however I did not have to opt in.
Once you have created a search, the search criteria remains on the right side so you can easily refine the search.
I searched for “social media” checking “All” for each category except I did only ask for “English” for the language. This yield 131,176 results. I refined my search on the right under “Refine Search” and expanded “Location” and typed in Las Vegas and this narrowed the search down to 303.
I do seem to like the beta version as the search results provide a snapshot of how many connections and what groups you have in common (in basic; expanded shows current and prior work as indicated above). However, when you click to connect, you have to use the back arrow to return to the search results. Would be better if it had a “back to search results” button as it does when you just view a profile.
Have you tried this yet? Thoughts? Will this prompt you to search and try and connect with more people?
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