Friday, June 05, 2009

Boolean Search Strings

The “real” work of creating effective Boolean search strings lies in the interpretive analysis of the need, determining what terms to include and exclude from searches and in what specific combination, in the analysis of the relevance of the initial search results, and the adaptive process of learning from the results to further refine the Booleans to find a large quantity of highly relevant results - people who are highly likely to be the right match for your hiring needs.

Few search strings I used for my searches and i come across on the internet mentioned below for your convenience:


1) site:www.linkedin.com Java inurl:in OR inurl:pub (This search will give all java guys on linked in)

2) related:www.pentaho.com/ (This string will search all the related companies)

3) site:LinkedIn.com inurl:in OR inurl:pub “looking * work OR job” OR “laid off” OR available SAP ~Consult (will look for profiles that have the word SAP and a variation of “consult” such as consultant or consulting)

4) site:LinkedIn.com inurl:in OR inurl:pub

5) site:LinkedIn.com inurl:in OR inurl:pub “looking * work OR job” OR “laid off” OR available

6) site:ning.com intitle:page

7) site:craigslist.org inurl:res

8) Tilde ~ and Plus +
Tilde in front of a word means any word “like” this word. It needs to be used with care since you have no control over what Google may think is “like” your word. However, if the number of results is small or if you suspect you may not know of some synonyms for your keyword, using the tilde may help.
The plus sign in front of a word tells Google to use exactly this word. This may be useful for two reasons. One, Google typically ignores what they call “stop” words, meaning very common short words like “the” or “in”. If you put a plus + in front of the, it will be included for sure. Two, Google “auto stems” which means that it will look for some variations of a word you include; if you search for manager it will show results with management as well. Put a plus in front of manager and the results will contain exactly this word. (Sorry, this may sound a little too technical, but it’s important to understand how your results are put together.)

9) Asterisk
Asterisk * is a very mysterious symbol in Google. Though it formally means “some words,” in reality (or is it better to say in practice?) it stands for “one word or very few words.” (The symbol * does not stand for a part of a word on Google as it does elsewhere.)
Here’s a quick example showing how it works. Search for “Oracle * Administrator” (plus keywords) and you will find Oracle Database Administrator, Oracle Discoverer Administrator, etc.

The asterisk * is actually a very powerful tool. Here are some uses.
If you are looking for an email pattern for a company or are trying to collect email addresses, you can use
“email * companyname.com” or
“mailto * companyname.com “
Since the symbol * typically stands for one word, you can add more asterisks to these strings and get different results.
(”email * * companyname.com” etc.)
Please note that since Google ignores special symbols, including the symbol @ in your strings is not necessary.
Here’s one of my favorite sourcing “tricks.” You can look for phrases and land on blogs, forums, and homepages, not resumes, but this may put you ahead of the competition if they only look for resumes.
Here are examples of Google searches for phrases. This would bring up pages written by people who work or used to work for or have something to do with Accenture. (Replace Accenture with your target company name.) Add your keywords to these strings to narrow down the searches:
“I work * Accenture”
“I am * Accenture”
“when I * Accenture”

10) site:www.linkedin.com inurl:in OR inurl:pub JDEdward * Functional +India (JDE functional guys in India)

11) (inurl:cv OR intitle:cv OR intitlel:vitae OR inurl:vitae OR inurl:resume OR intitle:resume) JDEdward ("Functional" OR "Financial") -job -jobs .in India

12) (inurl:Jobs OR intitle:Jobs OR intitlel:Opening OR inurl:Opening OR inurl:requirement OR intitle:requirement) Sales ("Software" OR "Financial") -job -jobs .in India

13) (inurl:Jobs OR intitle:Jobs OR intitlel:Opening OR inurl:Opening OR inurl:requirement OR intitle:requirement) Sales ("sales manager" OR "sales") (banking OR insurance) -job -jobs .in India

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