29 June 2015

Find LinkedIn Profiles with Google Search


LinkedIn, the largest network of professionals in the world, is also the favorite hunting ground for recruiters and staffing agencies. Whether you are looking for a list of college students who are currently interning at Facebook or a head hunter building a pool of presumptive candidates, LinkedIn will not disappoint.

LinkedIn has a useful search function to help you find potential candidates but do you know that Google search can also help to find people on LinkedIn. Google indexes every public profile of LinkedIn and if you perform people search on LinkedIn via Google, you get a few additional features:

  • While LinkedIn will only show 10 results per search query in one page, Google can return up to 100 results in one search results page.
  • You can perform date-limited searches in Google and this is helpful when you are only looking for profiles that have been created or updated in a particular date range.
  • You can automatically easily save your LinkedIn search results in a spreadsheet using the Google search Scraper for further analysis.

LinkedIn Scraper

LinkedIn Scraper with Google Search

OK, let’s take a look at how we can search LinkedIn profiles with the help of Google. Say you are trying to find people for senior position who are based in New York area. Here’s how we’ll construct the Google search query.

1. Show LinkedIn profiles but exclude internal LinkedIn search pages:

site:linkedin.com/in/ OR site:linkedin.com/pub/ -intitle:profiles -inurl:"/dir"

2. Find LinkedIn profiles of people who have senior positions:

"head | vp | vice-president | senior | director" site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub -intitle:profiles -inurl:"/dir"

3. Find matching LinkedIn profiles who are based in NY (wild card search)

"Location * New York" "head | vp | senior | director" site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub -intitle:profiles -inurl:"/dir

You can further refine search results by adding the domain (like Sales & Marketing) or even the company name to limit your search to executives of a particular organization.

Find LinkedIn Profiles by Post Code

Google search supports number ranges meaning you can search pages that contain numbers within a specific range. For instance, if you say “apples 1900..2000″ on Google, it will show matching pages that contain any number before 1900 and 2000.

We can extend the same trick to perform LinkedIn people search on Google. To give you an example, the pin code of Delhi is something like 110049. So if you are looking for web developers in the Delhi area on LinkedIn, you search query would be something like:

"web developer" 110001..110099 site:linkedin.com/in

One more thing. A search query like site:linkedin.com will perform a global search. However, you can use country specific sub-domains in LinkedIn to only show candidates from a particular country. For instance, site:uk.linkedin.com/in web-developer will find LinkedIn profiles from UK while site:ca.linkedin.com/in will only look for candidates that have set thir region as Canada.

Also see: Stop broadcasting your LinkedIn profile updates


The story, Find LinkedIn Profiles with Google Search, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 29/06/2015 under Google, LinkedIn, Internet.

How to Update Files in Google Drive without Changing the Link


John uploaded a PDF file in Google Drive and shared it with Peter. A week later, John updated the PDF file and uploaded the new version to Google Drive. Peter however still has the link to the old version and John will have to send him another email informing of the new version. Confusing, right?

You’ve probably gone through this situation where you have multiple copies of the same file residing in your Google Drive and, while you would like everyone to use the latest version, they are either not aware that the file has been updated or it takes too much work to locate it in the Drive.

When you have multiple copies of the same file in Drive, it not only creates confusion but the files also take up precious storage space in your Drive. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could simply replace an existing file in Google Drive with the new version instead of uploading it as a separate file? Well, there’s a solution:

Replace Files in Google Drive

  1. Go to your Google Drive and select any file that you would like to update. This is applicable for files that are not in that native Google Docs format like PDF, images, text files or even videos.
  2. Right-click the file, choose Manage Versions from the menu and then click the Upload new version button to upload the updated file to your Google Drive.
  3. That’s it. The file name and the file’s URL won’t change and thus all the old shared links will now automatically point to the new version of your file.

Replace Files in Google Drive

You can use the same method to replace a file in one format with another format. For instance, if you have a video file in Drive that you would like to replace with a GIF animation of smaller file size, the Manage Versions option will do the trick. And the shared link won’t change either.

Also see: Create Download Links for files in Google Drive

Things are a bit easier for Dropbox users. If you would like to update a shared file in Dropbox but without changing the link, simply upload the new version of the file in the same Dropbox folder.

When you upload a file in Dropbox and another file with a similar name already exists, Dropbox will simply replace the old file with the new one while the shared link will continue to work. In the case of Google Drive, you can can have multiple file with the same name in one folder and hence the confusion.

Also see: Add Files to Multiple Folders in Drive


The story, How to Update Files in Google Drive without Changing the Link, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 29/06/2015 under Dropbox, Google Drive, Internet.