LinkedIn Company Search Opens Up the Other Half of the Professional Social Graph

LinkedIn, the social network for the career-minded, has unveiled Company Search, a way to “search for companies not only by attributes such as location, industry, and size but also by how you are connected.”

The feature not only makes it easier to search for companies, and employees of those companies with whom you have a connection, but also follow those companies explicitly so you can keep up to date with news, hiring and other events. For a social network centered around professional connections, it only makes sense to make explicitly accessible the other half of the professional social graph – the company.

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The search goes well beyond a simple keyword based search, allowing users to filter search results according to how many connections they have at a certain company, its location, industry and other criteria. Brad Mauney, product manager for search and cloud at LinkedIn, explains the feature on the company’s blog.

Results are personalized for you based on a number of factors including the keywords used in your search, any filters you have applied, and your overall connection strength to that company. When searching for a company, we not only look across the words used to describe that company but also the words that the company’s employees use to describe themselves on their LinkedIn profiles.

Mauney explains that the feature could be great for job-seekers, as they can search for companies, filter by only companies that are hiring and then immediately look at those companies’ job listings. We hope that the follow feature lives up to its full potential and helps us keep an eye on internal movement in the industry. Even better, if we could grab an RSS feed of each company and look at that data in our RSS reader, we’d be even happier. What do you say, LinkedIn?

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