Social media sites are as strong as their weakest search tool. Twitter, Facebook (News - Alert) and Pinterest have all recently updated their search features to ensure users are getting a unified, simple and relevant search experience within the social networks.
LinkedIn (News - Alert) is the professional networking site in the world of social media, and it just enhanced its position with an update to its search experience. With 5.7 billion professionally oriented searches from 200 million registered users on LinkedIn last year, search plays a big role in the network.
Until today, users would search for people, companies or jobs separately. Now, they can have a unified search, and results will show up with the most relevant results based on their professional identities, networks and how the people in their networks engage with LinkedIn. So, searching for a company name will display results of people who work there, job openings and the company’s own profile. Users can also search for a job title and see people with that title, open positions and companies who are looking for that title.
LinkedIn also introduces new features for search, including auto-complete, suggested searches, smarter query intent algorithm, enhanced advanced search and automated alerts.
“No two professionals are alike on LinkedIn. This means even if you search for the same thing as someone else, your results will be customized to you,” a company blog post explained. “LinkedIn’s search efforts are founded on the ability to take into account who you are, who you know, and what your network is doing to help you find what you’re looking for. And we’ll continue iterating on this with better ways to surface new kinds of content across LinkedIn as well as more personalized results.”
The new search starts rolling out to members today and will be available to all global members in the upcoming weeks.