Does LinkedIn Limit Results?
It seems that the answer is YES, LinkedIn does throttle search results. I was working with a founder on his startup project this morning. They are building a cool product that serves the Registered Investment Advisors. The topic of the call was how to create a growth hack to test the initial set of product assumptions with the target customer segment.
So, off to LinkedIn to create a list of potential prospecta based on Title and Connections. Here’s the scenario: three linked in users, none premium users. The Search was for “Registered Investment Advisor” (in quotes).
- One with > 2,000 connections
- One with > 1,000 connections
- One with <1,000 connections
What we discovered was that when we were comparing our networks the result set came back the same.
The first results included both Past and Current positions and produced 1,459 results for each of us – though the actual connections were different based on our own individual network (some overlap due to our connections).
The second search queary was for the same job title, but only those individuals who Currently held the positions. The results in this case were 851. Again, not the same people when sorted by Relevance, Relationship, etc.
Finally, we did a third search with the same Title and Current position, but we limited the results to within 50 miles of 94111, downtown San Francisco.
We were all surprised by the results. Not that it had been limited, but that the numbers that were returned seem to show a random result vs. a round number. If you’re limiting the results, why not say 1,400+, 800+ or 25+?
Maybe it’s time to upgrade to LinkedIn premium again?