LinkedIn announced its team has been working to reengineer its search engine to help users find what they’re looking for faster.
The company claims that its new search engine, which is now available, can save its members more than a year of collective time spent searching.
Here is a run down of some of the changes made:
- Results Based On Connections: LinkedIn will now populate its search results based on what it believes is most relevant to you based on your connections, groups, and companies.
- Search Beyond Your Connections: For the first time, LinkedIn is giving its free members the ability to search outside of their group of connections. This used to be a premium feature.
- Personalized search results: LinkedIn will personalize search results based on the information you have provided in your profile.
- Surfacing Users’ Content: Now when you perform a search, LinkedIn may surface content other users have uploaded to the network, such as blog posts and SlideShare decks, if its relevant to the search.
On that last point, I wonder if being included in search results will get more eyeballs on content published directly to LinkedIn. The company recently opened up its publishing platform to all english-speaking users, so it’s clearly an area where the company trying to grow.
These changes are “just the start”, the company says, and we can expect more developments coming from LinkedIn throughout the year.
