LinkedIn made some major changes to how its search features work on Wednesday.
Simply put, the company has updated and rearranged its query functions, so rather than always using the drop down that sits next to the search box to specifically select between, say, “people,” “companies,” “groups” or “skills” when doing a search, the site now combines the results.
So for example, entering “financial advi” into the search box immediately begins to auto-complete your query and automatically present you with results for each of those categories; the list categories being separated by a thin gray line (see the bottom-most screenshot below if you are having difficulty visualizing this).
And the results, as they were before, are tailored for you, with your own characteristics factored in.
In other words you do not have to select a specific category each time you search, it will bring up multiple results for each category automatically.
You might ask “why do I want that?”
The answer is you may not but that is the way your mind has been trained to search for things. And while the results might seem overwhelming at first you might just discover things by accident that you did not know you needed.
For example you might just be searching for a “financial adviser” or the closest ones to you but you will also find “the financial advisor network” group that you might not know existed.
And that latter I believe is what LinkedIn has in mind, revealing more of what they have for you at once.
Now, just in case you need some context, there were 5.7 billion “professionally oriented searches” conducted on LinkedIn in 2012.
That was the statistic that LinkedIn product manager Johnathan Podemsky topped his blog post with the other day.
I have long been a fan of LinkedIn. Not since the beginning mind you --- in fact the first time I reviewed the site it was just out of beta and had about 400,000 users, not the 200 million it does today.
And at that point I could not get the firm's feisty director of communications off my back for questioning some of the new features and their level of intuitiveness or rather what I thought at the time was a lack thereof.
She has long since left (we remain friends) but what I continue to note about the site is that the folks working there are striving to improve many of the features on an ongoing basis. This is but one example of that.
And behind it are actual search professionals (see the two folks at the bottom who put together a slideshow) whose job it is to actually think about these things and who are forced into completing various sorts of algebraic expressions to boost the search algorithm.
Among other “improvements” is “Auto-complete” where “as you type your search term you'll be prompted with options for what you may be looking for, and the more you search, the better it will get at predicting what you want”.
There are also suggested searches, a “smarter query intent algorithm” and enhanced advanced search capabilities (additional filters including location, company, school and other items).
With the “query intent algorithm” basically the more you search for things on the site the more the algorithm will learn about you and your most common searches.
You can also save search alerts which I think will be of most use to recruiters and the like but what do I know? Advisers and others should just start using search with these features in mind and see what strikes them. Please share your thoughts, especially if you hit on some way in which it helps you as a financial adviser do your business better. I'm sure others would like to share in the discovery.
The blog says these features were being rolled out to members as of Wednesday, I have them as of today but you might not. Stateside folks will get them first with global subscribers coming thereafter.
For more information check out the
post by LinkedIn product manager Johnathan Podemsky on the company's blog.
Slideshare users (that startup is now owned by LinkedIn btw) can also gain additional insight by viewing the informative, if fairly focused
presentation on information retrieval that LinkedIn's search team put together; specifically by LinkedIn's head of search relevance Shakti Sinha and his counterpart, the head of query understanding Daniel Tunkelang (yes, those are their actual titles).
