Comments on: LinkedIn name search is ridiculously bad

By: Tony Lacy(-)Thompson

Tony Lacy(-)Thompson — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 07:54:57 +0000

Curt,

I am honored that you used my name as a test case for searching LinkedIn. As it happens, the hyphen optional, and is more of a late 20th century addition, but especially important in the US. In the UK I could go to any theatre (theater) box office and have no difficulty picking up tickets under the name “Lacy Thompson”. Here in the US, picking up a prescription requires many repetitions of “the last name is LACY-Thompson. Yes, look under “L”, etc.” If only the name had come with more money…

Tony L-T

By: Tony Lacy(-)Thompson

Tony Lacy(-)Thompson — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 07:54:22 +0000

Curt,

I am honored that you used my name as a test case for searching LinkedIn. As it happens, the hyphen optional, and is more of a late 20th century addition, but especially important in the US. In the UK I could go to any theatre (theater) box office and have no difficulty picking up tickets under the name “Lacy Thompson”. Here in the US, picking up a prescription requires many repititions of “the last name is LACY-Thompson. Yes, look under “L”, etc.” If only the name had come with more money…

Tony L-T

By: B McKenzie

B McKenzie — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 18:14:12 +0000

You want bad? Netflix. Spectacularly bad if you don’t know how to spell a title, plus it doesn’t support any sort of compound query.

My latest example was searching for “Akeelah and the Bee”. Given that I got the tip verbally I had no idea how to spell Akeelah (”Ach…”) and “Bee” doesn’t show it. Had to got to IMDB and then back.

Two thumbs down for NF.

By: Daniel Weinreb

Daniel Weinreb — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:48:27 +0000

I also asked LinkedIn to provide a way to ask “Find people who worked at BOTH X and Y”. Every so often that would be useful.

By: Otis Gospodnetic

Otis Gospodnetic — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 02:15:40 +0000

LinkedIn does use Lucene, but let’s not even hint at *that* being the source of the problem. It’s a matter of LinkedIn using tools (like Lucene and its cousins) in clever ways, that is all.

By: Carlo

Carlo — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 21:38:18 +0000

That’s definitely an area to improve. Luckily, I haven’t really come across a name that easy to misspell.

By: Mike Tuchen

Mike Tuchen — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 12:29:50 +0000

I find LinkedIn incredibly useful in many business contexts, but agree its search is decades behind the state of the art. Another set of simple things it’s missing include any concept of boolean search (everything is hard “AND”), most fielded searches beyond a couple trivial things, or any kind of metadata exploration. On the latter point, it’s got one of the best set of fielded metadata around but almost completely ignores it from a search UI perspective even in their paid subscription tiers. I hope the LinkedIn folks hire a great search technologist sometime soon – they’ve done a terrific job of becoming a must-use business tool but haven’t yet built the system that meets some of their users’ basic expectations.

By: Martin Griffies

Martin Griffies — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:55:01 +0000

Using Lucene dies not exclude the use of taxonomies, data dictionaries or whatever for semantic or extended search. I guess it’s pure laziness or other distractions on LinkedIn’s behalf.
Having said that, they seem to add useless features at intervals rather than improving the search, which I also find poor.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:34:13 +0000

LinkedIn is a Lucene shop–see http://www.slideshare.net/linkedin/linkedins-communication-architecture for more details about their architecture. I’m not sure what IMDB is using, but I imagine that they can draw on technology, expertise, and resources from Amazon.

I’d love to see LinkedIn improve its search functionality. Beyond the basics, like better spelling suggestions, they could be a poster child for exploratory search.