by Glenn Gutmacher

Over the past year, Shally Steckerl has come up with several creative (and legal) hacks to leverage the content spidered by the major search engines on the public versions of recruiting-rich candidate portals, notably LinkedIn (the large professional social network) and Jigsaw (the large business card exchange network). What's nice is that these free hacks don't require you to belong to either portal in order to tap the information.

Shally's recent post lists the basic Jigsaw hack. But if you run it as is, you'll probably notice many irrelevant (noise) results with the string, which is, by the way:

site:jigsaw.com intitle:in.jigsaw's CompanyName

You should eliminate the directory-type pages on Jigsaw which are not the pseudo (i.e., semi-blinded; read Shally's post if you don't know what I mean) business cards. (This step is just as important if you adapt the above Google hack to find LinkedIn profile results. I highly recommend you check out Shally's LinkedIn cheatsheet for the clean version, which works fabulously.)

So this tweak fixes the Google string to hack Jigsaw in that respect:

site:jigsaw.com intitle:in.jigsaw's CompanyName -intitle:business.contacts.from -intitle:company.directory.from

Now let's use an actual example (Virtual Iron, a software company), which will illustrate a couple of further useful string tweaks:

site:jigsaw.com intitle:in.jigsaw's Virtual.Iron -intitle:business.contacts.from -intitle:company.directory.from

The above still generates a number of business card results that are not people at the company, but rather contain the body text "Contacts with similar titles as [profilee's name]" followed by the name of someone else who is at Virtual Iron (or whatever target company you wanted) but there's no link to him/her. Some of you may find that valuable, but those names are almost always for people whose own business card pages will be among the results you obtained.

So in order to get really pure results (i.e., just the Virtual Iron personnel's business cards), you should use this template (again, substitute your target company for Virtual Iron):

site:jigsaw.com intitle:in.jigsaw's "co-workers at virtual iron" -intitle:business.contacts.from -intitle:company.directory.from

Notice that I did *not* type dots between words in the revised clause (which I kept in the rest of the string to be consistent with Shally's original post). Why? Because you can actually lose valid results if you don't use quotation marks. I don't know why that is, since these are supposed to be equivalent ways to indicate a phrase in Google, but notice what happens if you do the following string instead:

site:jigsaw.com intitle:in.jigsaw's co-workers.at.virtual.iron -intitle:business.contacts.from -intitle:company.directory.from

You lose Steve Noyes (which is a Virtual Iron employee result in Jigsaw at the time Google last spidered that part of the site) from the results!

P.S. Many people have asked why LinkedIn and Jigsaw are giving free access to their people content via the search engines. It's also being done by Spoke and a number of other portals, by the way. They let the search engines spider a fairly robust public version of their people content on purpose because it generates a lot of click-through traffic back to their websites. That lets them generate new member registrations, additional advertising revenue through increased page views, etc. In their view, the pros outweigh the cons because it's still a relatively small percentage of their potential audience who knows how to hack this way!