LinkedIn has upgraded its search feature, offering better post results and improved personalised listings, as well as making search faster and more intuitive for end users.
Perhaps the biggest improvement to LinkedIn’s search is that it is now more personalised. LinkedIn aims to offer results that are based on a user’s connections, rather just from a list of brands and users. This means that users who aren’t sure exactly who they are looking for will get more accurate, targeted results and will spend less time trawling through unrelated names and brands.
LinkedIn’s new search feature will also help to combat typos and misspellings by presenting the closest results for a query, even if the spelling doesn’t match exactly.
Open to All Users
The upgrade is open to all users – the previous last name restrictions that were placed on non-premium users are to be removed, and users will all see full names in the search results. This will also apply to keyword searches. Instead of seeing “LinkedIn Member” against keyword searches, even non-premium users will now see a name next to the user’s face.
LinkedIn will allow people to filter their searches to target people, jobs, companies, universities, groups, or their own individual inboxes. The results will be based on the searcher’s connections, and can be sorted by recency or by relevance. Those who have a better idea of what they are looking for can take advantage of more granular filtering by date or author.
Better Quality Networking
These search filters will be a boon for B2B advertisers looking to promote products and services on LinkedIn, as well as job hunters, recruiters and event organisers. Social media search features have lagged behind traditional search for a long time, and LinkedIn in particular has had a lot of problems with relevance and providing a high quality service to its users. This should make it easier for LinkedIn to attract advertisers to its platform.
Open networkers – those who add absolutely anyone who is interested in connecting, are a huge problem for LinkedIn because they water down the value of the service by increasing the likelihood of people on the network being contacted by un-targeted leads or prospects. This new search feature won’t stop open networkers from trying to befriend site members, but it will improve the quality of search for those who prefer to keep their networks industry only, as the site intended.
