LinkedIn: Search Less and Less Relevant?
September 24, 2013
I read “Today I Deleted My LinkedIn Account”. One of the goslings handles my LinkedIn account. If a comment is required, the gosling alerts me. One of the researchers snags relevant material and crafts either questions or a statement based on my previously published writings. One research librarian filters requests to be my “friend.” The policy is to ask, “When and where did we meet?” For the most part, the system works, but the information flowing through LinkedIn is not directly relevant to the work we do. Like any social media service, the process helps prevent abuses. We did experience a script kiddy who routed our tweets of articles in this blog and our other online publications through Miley Cyrus’ account. When I looked at what the clever teen had done, I learned a great deal about Ms. Cyrus. Great parenting at work I suppose.
The main point of the “Today I Deleted” write up is that LinkedIn is annoying to the author of the write up. I sympathize with folks who are annoyed at online information services today. The good old days of paying to access File 15 on Dialog are long gone. The hassles were mostly the cost of information and the silliness of the dial up terminal with bunny rabbit ears. I bet you don’t know what bunny rabbit ears are, do you?
The numbers the author presents are astounding. LinkedIn, according to the write up, has 225 million “members.” I am not sure how many are like me, operating through research professionals who are paid to ride herd on social interactions. I am not sure how many are human resource professionals looking to make a buck by referring a person whom the HR professional does not know to a company about which the HR professionals knows only a bit more.
I surmise that the majority of the 225 million are people looking for:
- Work
- Human contact albeit digitally intermediated
- Information about something that will yield money, power, or prestige
- A way to kill time whilst “looking at potentially high value content”
- Horn tooting.
The write up focuses on what LinkedIn does to a particular user. For example, LinkedIn emails are annoying. A more interesting aspect of LinkedIn surfaces in this statement:
For the quarter ending June 2013, Facebook reported 1,155,000,000 monthly active users. Calling their original registration numbers ~1,300,000,000 which is generous), that means that 88% of Facebook’s users actually use the site regularly.
Compare that to LinkedIn, which claims that 170,000,000 of its 218,000,000 users logged in during the quarter ending March 2013, for a total of closer to 77%. That number actually understates the disparity, because it just measures unique visitors.
While LinkedIn users spend an average of 8 minutes on the site daily, Facebook users hang round for over 33 minutes, or OVER HALF AN HOUR each. In fact, LinkedIn puts this problem much better than I can:“The number of our registered members is higher than the number of actual members and a substantial majority of our page views are generated by a minority of our members. Our business may be adversely impacted if we are unable to attract and retain additional members who actively use our services.” (source)
(traffic stats: Facebook,LinkedIn, SEC data: LinkedIn, Facebook).
You should read the original post.
What struck me is that search or finding information within LinkedIn is not mentioned as an issue. LinkedIn hired a Googler to supplement their open source search team. I find that looking for content using the LinkedIn search box is a very interesting process. A direct query leads to the request to log in. (I call the gosling to find out what my user name and password are.) Once logged in, I am asked to upgrade to a paying service. I ignore that and go to third party search systems.
I can access some interesting LinkedIn information using the services which I highlight in my ISS World lecture this week. It appears that some LinkedIn information is indexed by third party services. A click on a link from some of these third party services displays the person’s profile. In some cases, I can view the people in some way “related” the the person about whom I seek information. I find this interesting because I have not been able to answer these questions:
- What services index LinkedIn content?
- How much information is available to third party services either via the LinkedIn tools, deals, or just clever spidering?
- What are the constraints on the use of the LinkedIn data within the third party indexes?
It makes sense to me that LinkedIn would want some of its content in various third party indexes. Because LinkedIn’s search function is unsatisfactory for my purposes, I find the third party approach more helpful to me.
What annoys me about LinkedIn is not its play to make lots of money. I don’t care too much about spam which is easily filtered. I don’t care a whit about the ego centric nature of the system.
I care about search, and I sure hope that LinkedIn improves its search system and I hope it makes explicit what services index LinkedIn content with or without explicit permission.
But saying, doing, and appearing are very different things in today’s challenging business environment. I may get a gosling to look into third party indexing of LinkedIn. For now, I boil down much of an online system’s value to search. For me, that’s the key function. LinkedIn, like other social media systems, wants to focus on other features. Too bad. I think that part of the value of LinkedIn is its content, however flawed. Access would urge me to pay more attention to a service fueled by financial need/desperation, professional branding/visibility, and sales/marketing.
Stephen E Arnold, September 24, 2013
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