Recruitment being my profession, I am always on the lookout for improving myself at it. If you are a recruiter yourself you would know how important the tool LinkedIn is for you to connect with those passive professionals out there who might be interested in exploring the opportunity you have at hand. Sadly not everybody gets to use the premium version of the LinkedIn. For people with little options, the best way is to utilize the tool to the maximum possible. Since search is among the key aspects, I was looking to exploit the search feature in LinkedIn. The Basic search and the Boolean search was something that was easy to figure out. I was looking for more ways to exploit search, and I ended up into their tutorial sections here. The page is an extensive documentation of the searches which can be performed on LinkedIn. Reference search and search by operator’s were the key learning’s to me. I’ll just mention the operator’s here for your quick reference. If you are a beginner trying to use LinkedIn searches I suggest you head to the linked page and do a detailed study.
Over the past few weeks I have been wondering (not loudly until now) if Google’s search results were getting manipulated. So much of trust on Google that I was convincing myself it was just my whim. Now it looks like a lot of experts & geeks like Jeff Atwood,Anil Dash and Marco are echoing the same thoughts. After reading these blogs its apparent that Google’s search is getting compromised considerably.
My majority of the searches are usually for some drivers or reference guides about installation or troubleshooting some installation or about apple and their products. I can easily say that the driver downloads or the reference guides over the past few months were mostly to spam sites with useless downloads and only keywords. My luck for such searches with other search sites also are rarely useful which leaves me sadly with Google. I believe at least I would find something in the fifth or sixth page.
Definitely it is Google’s overwhelming monopoly on search that is getting exploited. I am no geek here to explain how and why Google’s screwing up, please head over to the blogs linked to get a better idea of it. Vaguely Google’s algorithms are getting cheated by a lot of cheap SEO experts, and ultimately users like us end up looking at some hundreds of worthless ads with the same search words written over and over again.
I am still hopeful that Google would do something about this to fix it . From the comments on Jeff’s blog by Matt looks like Google is already aware about this and is working on improving search quality. Not sure how they are going to fix this, because they themselves taught all these guy’s to fool around with their algorithms in the name of SEO. To me it seems like Google has to reinvent the wheel again, till then we need to shuffle our search engines often, after all that’s what I am doing right now.
