Tag Archives: LinkedIn

Faceted Search by LinkedIn

Posted on by
Reply

My RSS feeds have been buzzing about the LinkedIn faceted search since it was first released from beta in December. So why is the new search at LinkedIn so interesting that people are almost constantly discussing it? I think it’s partly because LinkedIn is a site that is used by most professionals and searching for people is core functionality on LinkedIn. But the search interface on LinkedIn is also a very good example of faceted search.

I decided to have a closer look into their search. The first thing I realized was just how many different kinds of searches there are on LinkedIn. Not only the obvious people search but also, job, news, forum, group, company, address book, answers and reference search. LinkedIn has managed to integrate search so that it’s the natural way of finding information on the site. People search is the most prominent search functionality but not the only one.

I’ve seen several different people search implementations and they often have a tendency to work more or less like phone books. If you know the name you type it and get the number. And if you’re lucky you can also get the name if you only have the number. There is seldom anyway to search for people with a certain competence or from a geographic area. LinkedIn sets a good example of how searching for people could and should work.

LinkedIn has taken careful consideration of their users; What information they are looking for, how they want it presented and how they need to filter searches in order to find the right people. The details that I personally like are the possibility to search within filters for matching options (I worked on a similar solution last year) and how different filters are displayed (or at least in different order) depending on what query the user types. If you want to know more about how the faceted search at LinkedIn was designed, check out the blog post by Sara Alpern.

But LinkedIn is not only interesting because of the good search experience. It’s also interesting from a technical perspective. The LinkedIn search is built on open source so they have developed everything themselves. For those of you interested in the technology behind the new LinkedIn search I recommend “LinkedIn search a look beneath the hood”, by Daniel Tunkelang where he links to a presentation by John Wang search architect at LinkedIn.

Find People with Spock

Posted on by
1

Today, Google is the main source for finding information on the web, regardless of the kind of information you’re looking for. Let it be company information, diseases, or to find people – Google is used for finding everything. While Google is doing a great job in finding relevant information, it can be good to explore alternatives that are concentrated upon a more specific target.

In the previous post, Karl blogged about alternatives to Google that provides a different user interface. Earlier, Caroline has enlightened us about search engines that leads to new ways on how to use search. Today I am going to continue on these tracks and tell you a bit about a new challenger, Spock, and my first impressions of using it.

Spock, relased last week in beta version, is a search engine for finding people. Interest in finding people, both celebreties and ordinary people has risen the past years; just look at the popularity of social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook. By using a search engine dedicated to finding people, you get more relevancy in the hits and more information in each hit. Spock crawls the above mentioned sites, as well as a bunch of others to gather the information about people you want to find.

When you begin to use Spock, you instantly see the difference in search results compared to Google. Searching for “Java developer Seattle” in Spock returns a huge list of Java developers positioned in Seattle. With Google, you get a bunch of hiring applications. Searching for a famous person like Steve Jobs with Google, you find yourself with thousands of pages about the CEO of Apple. Using Spock, you will learn that there are a lot of other people around the world also named Steve Jobs. With each hit, you find more information such as pictures, related people, links to pages that the person is mentioned on, etc.

In true Web 2.0 fashion, Spock uses tags to place people into categories. By exploring these tags, you will find even more people that might be of interest. Users can even register on Spock to add and edit tags and information about people.

Over all, Spock seems like a great search engine to me. The fact that users can contribute to the content, a fact that has made Wikipedia to what it is today, combined with good relevancy and a clean interface it has a promising future. It also shows how it is possible to compete with Google and the other giants at the search market by focusing on a specific target and deliver an excellent search experience in that particular area.