LinkedIn started rolling out a beta version of faceted people search back in July. Now it’s officially out of beta, as announced on their blog. I’ve re-posted the video above in case you missed it in July.
Interestingly, LinkedIn developed its own tool to support the combination of faceted search with social network search: Bobo-Browse (Otis mentioned it in our recent presentation to the New York CTO Club). I helped develop similar functionality when I was at Endeca, so I know how hard this problem is. LinkedIn has done an impressive job–and has applied it to one of the most valuable data sets on the web. Bravo!
But I can’t help asking for just one more thing. LinkedIn has great semi-structured data about its 50+ million members. I’d love to be able to explore that data using more facets–in particular, facets relating to people’s job skills and expertise. I hope that’s something they’re working on. Perhaps a good topic of conversation at the upcoming Workshop on Search and Social Media!
The Noisy Channel 
3 replies on “LinkedIn Faceted Search Now Out Of Beta”
Agree Daniel, more facets are needed: role/job title, skills, availability would all be key. And the location facet is a bit tricky to use – seems to mix countries and cities?
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Yeah, not sure if / how they are addressing hierarchy. If the data is clean, at least non-leaf locations will counts at least as high as their subdivisions. I haven’t checked if LinkedIn gets that right consistently.
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[…] fortune to attend a presentation by John Wang, search architect at LinkedIn. You may have read my earlier posts about LinkedIn introducing faceted search and celebrating the interface from a user perspective. […]
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