Recruiting Trends 2015 Bratcher-Get off Google and Bing

I have the honor of speaking at the 2015 Recruiting Trends Conference in Orlando, Fl on November 8-10th. I will be presenting on using alternative search engines besides the Goggle and The Bing. Here is a sneak peek:

Using a search engine does NOT mean you are searching the Internet!

Search engines don’t give you access to all pages on the web, only the ones it has found and indexed.

Each search engine searches the web and catalogs pages in different ways.

Because of hierarchy individual indexing methods one search engine will have a set of results different than the other.

It’s good to have a favorite search engine, one you are most comfortable using, but don’t get complacent and place all your bets on one single search engine. Get to know at least three of them very well.

No single search engine has yet been able to search the entire Internet. Chances are that with the Internet growing faster than search engines can keep up, this may never happen. As a result, it’s wise to use at least three of the major search engines for any given search. Because the type of information you seek as a recruiter is contained in hard to find pages, it’s possible that what you seek is listed in one search engine but not another. If you stop at just one or two search engines you are probably going to miss many useful leads.

You are Human, Use Tools!

·         Read the instructions, learn the uniqueness and specialized commands of that tool

·         When you evaluate new ones consider how many pages they have indexed, how fast you can search through those pages, how easy it is to use advanced commands, and how relevant the results are.

Think!

·         Know when to stop searching (do what?) who the heck does that?

·         Take time to learn about the different search engines and determine for yourself what best fits your needs.

·         Remember that if you don’t find what you are looking for with one search engine, it doesn’t mean that the information doesn’t exist.

My Best Advice

·         Spend 20% of your search time using new, different or unique sources

·         Things change or even stop working so spend 10% of your time looking for NEW sources

A Peek at My Favorite Alternatives

Duckduckgo.com

What? Not a search engine but searches all the best ones and helps you get better results because of its simple to use interface across all searches.

So What? It doesn’t track cookies so you get the real unfiltered results, AND you can use natural language syntax

Now What?

Explore the commands at https://duck.co/help/results/syntax. For example, what could you do with b:resume?

Go Bang! Check out http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html and figure out what you could do with !dogpile

Etools.ch

What? A Swiss meta-search engine

So What? It searches major international search engines fast and extensively

Now What?

“my resume” “software engineer” j2ee “san francisco” -job

Let’s try this in advanced settings: UX “my portfolio” hasbro elf

Junoba

What? A very simple and user friendly.

So What? It shows you the web results against your queries as well as social media results!

Now What? Try searching for images on this one...

Millionshort

What? An experimental “discovery engine” that eliminates the top one million popular sites from your searches .

So What? Discover sites that don't make it to the top of regular search engine results. Think about it - isn’t that where all the garbage is that you are trying to avoid?

Now What? Start with the opposite, go to MillionTALL.com and search using the name of one of your hard-to-find candidates you’ve been trying to track down. What do you get? Lots of Twitter, Quora, LinkedIn, Facebook… etc. Now go to MillionSHORT.com and take out the top 1 million popular sites, now what do you get?

Hope to see you in Orlando!!