Custom Search Engines for Recruiters

Google-Plus Profiles - X-Rays G+; offers three refinements, to push forward (show in previews) locations; employers; and schools

LinkedIn – Countries - X-Rays LinkedIn profiles, offers a dozen refinements by country

Emails in Resumes - I am proud of this one! It not only looks for resumes, but also pushes email addresses in the resumes to be seen in the previews of the search results

Document Finder - looks for documents that are stored in one of a dozen popular document storage sites, such as slideshare

File Types - looks for certain file types such as Excel and PDF. It is helpful if you are searching specifically for lists or specifically for resumes

Google No-Captchas (a.k.a. Search Like a Human) – to prevent Google from asking you to fill out captchas, suspecting you are a Bot

Hidden Resumes - triggers a resume search without any search operators. It is used on the site http://hiddenresumes.com that I hope to update sometime soon

Comment by Matt Charney on December 11, 2013 at 2:48pm: These all require going to a third party site to utilize their functionality - any plug ins you can recommend to eliminate the need to have yet another tab open while sourcing? Also, what's the advantage of using these (which look like they're all powered by Google) versus actually inputting these strings directly into Google or using a tool like RecruitingBar to generate the same results?

Comment by Irina Shamaeva on December 11, 2013 at 8:59pm

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the comments and questions!

NO 3rd party software is required for these. Anyone who runs Google searches can run these as well.

Yes, you do have to open each one in their own window - this is where the links above point to. Basically, the pages it points to contain the front-end to each search engine. Alternatively, you can go to Google's own pages, such as

https://www.google.com/cse/publicurl?cx=009462381166450434430:dqo-6... for the No-Captcha engine; let me know if you want me to provide other links. This doesn't make them any easier (or harder) to use - it works just the same.

Custom Search Engines have the following advantages:

They encapsulate some Boolean strings logic that would otherwise be rather challenging for most to implement using advanced search strings. They hide the complexities from the end user.
They do not equal running advanced search strings in Google. They have advantages over "straight" Google search: can use URL templates, push the search strings' word limit, and more. (I can elaborate).
For those who use advanced search they eliminate the "you are not a robot" challenge that all of us have been experiencing over the last month. That alone currently would make custom search engines a preferred way to search vs. using the Recruiting Bar, Recruitem, and any other tools that generate search strings for Google. In fact, I have switched to using the I am Not a Robot custom engine for sourcing.

Hope this helps - happy to tell you more! I recommend trying them out with a few sample searches. Some of the results are "magical".

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