How To Get Around the Ridiculous LinkedIn Search Limitations

I blogged about this here: Bogus: LinkedIn search limits

I’ve been following threads by people who do LinkedIn training, like career counselors, and individuals who own their own business.  This limitation hampers their ability to promote LinkedIn, and even show how to do a good search, in LinkedIn.  Paying for a normal account might not even solve the problem.

Until someone at LinkedIn wakes up and pulls the plug on this horrific limitation that is only making LinkedIn unusable by people (ask me how I really feel), I’ll suggest a workaround for you.

I actually blogged about the hack back in 2011 (and a few other times): Do you use Site:______ in Google searches?  I DO! (I even have pretty color coded pictures on that blog post)

Here’s what you do: instead of going into LinkedIn to do a search for a person, place, company, etc., just do it in Google. It’s a normal search, but at the beginning of the search box you put this:

site:linkedin.com

You can copy and paste that… all it does is says “Google, do a search for “_______” but only search on this one website, which happens to be LinkedIn. A few things to note:

1. This works on other search engines (but they might have different way to do it). You can even do it on LinkedIn (see here)
2. This is the super simple way to do it… you can get much more advanced. Check out the four examples listed towards the top of this post.
3. The search results come back in Google (or whatever search engine you are using), which means it doesn’t count against your search quota in LinkedIn.
4. You don’t even have to login to LinkedIn to do this.
5. Google isn’t limiting your search results, yet :p

There you go – enjoy this fix for now.  Hopefully you won’t have to for long.