Many of us run Google searches regularly for resumes and other candidate resources. As it relates to the results that we get, this is one case where more is not necessarily better. As a matter of fact, more can often be downright misleading. What many people don’t realize is that Google, regardless of the results count you see, returns something in the neighborhood of 1000 results. Here is how to check this. First, go into Google Preferences and make sure you have Number of Results set to 100. Then, run any search and get over 1000 results. Then go to the bottom of the page and you will notice page numbers 1 - 10. Click on page 10 and you will see there is no Next button any more because the engine only returns the first 1000. Another indicator is the result count. Whenever you see Results 1 - 100 of about x,xxx that is your cue to work on your string. It is the word "about" that lets you know.

Whenever you have more than 1000 you need to add skills, title, industry, and geography keywords to get those results way down. A rule of thumb is getting results down is to use AND components to your string. Keep adding keywords until you get those results less than 1000 because it is not until that point that you actually know what you are dealing with. A better number of results to shoot for is somewhere in the 100-200 hit range. This is a number that most of us can get through in a sourcing session.

The good thing is that as you add keywords and the results decrease, the results that remain are better matches for your assignment. On the other hand, if you have too few results, you want to add OR components.

Remember...AND's decrease results...OR's increase results.