Sourcing Quiz. Practice Boolean and Win a Guest Pass to SourceCon.

Dear All,

If you haven’t registered for SourceCon yet, here is your chance to attend it for free by submitting your answers to the Sourcing Quiz (#SourceQuiz). Please email your submissions to contest@booleanstrings.com.
The deadline is next Monday, February 8, 2010. The winner’s prize is a guest pass to SourceCon.
Former SourceCon Challenge winners are not eligible (sorry).

Our goals, in addition to having one lucky person attend SourceCon, are:
* to explore some basics of online sourcing and search syntax, to help all of us who source online to be more efficient;
* to have fun!

All participants will be invited to a free webinar where we will discuss the answers and I will answer any other sourcing questions you might have.

Thanks to ERE/SourceCon for their support of the Boolean Strings Network and the Boolean Strings LinkedIn Group !

-Irina

The Sourcing Quiz
1. Suppose you want to search for resumes of people who might not be currently looking. How would you search for documents that were last indexed by Google more than two years ago?

2. A search on Google that includes this: “*@ibm.com” will return the pages that have at least one email address that belongs to somebody who works at IBM (yes/no; explain)

3. What will Google do if you include the word “not” (lower case) in your search string? Upper case (“NOT”)? How about Bing?

4. To look for special characters on Google, you need to put them inside the quotation marks. Example: “top 20%” will look for results that say top 20% (true/false).

5. What will Google search for if you include this in your string:
develop*
What about LinkedIn?

6. How would you search LinkedIn from Google (X-ray) to find database administrators from Canada? Note: your results must include profiles of people from Canada only and must not contain links other than profiles.

7. What are the differences between searching for people on LinkedIn from Google by X-raying and searching using the LinkedIn people search dialog? Name as many as you can.

8. There is a search box on the home page of Twitter. How would you search for tweets that ask questions about recruiting?

9. Suggest a search string on Google that will bring up YOUR profile as one of the results on the first page; do not use your name in the string.

10. [Bonus question, to be used in case of a tie]: on major search engines, such as Google, you are restricted to review no more than 1,000 results for any given search string. What would you do to view 1,001 search results?

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Irina Shamaeva on February 10, 2010 at 12:06am

Congratulations to Saral Bhatnagar who beautifully solved the Quiz and is getting a free pass to SourceCon in San Diego in Miarch! Well done!

A special mention to Medhavi who also gave all the correct answers but didn't asnwer to the optional question #10.

Thanks a lot to over 20 participants. Hope you enjoyed the Quiz.

The Sourcing Quiz Answers

1. Suppose you want to search for resumes of people who might not be currently looking. How would you search for documents that were last indexed by Google more than two years ago?

Answer: search, then select "show options" on the left and select the required time frame.

2. A search on Google that includes this: “*@ibm.com” will return the pages that have at least one email address that belongs to somebody who works at IBM (yes/no; explain)

Answer: Google ignores @ (as a special character); you would get pages without email addresses as well, just containing ibm.com

3. What will Google do if you include the word “not” (lower case) in your search string? Upper case (“NOT”)? How about Bing?

Answer: Google will include not as a keyword, Bing will only if it's lowercase; it works as a Boolean operator on Bing if it's capitalized.

4. To look for special characters on Google, you need to put them inside the quotation marks. Example: “top 20%” will look for results that say top 20% (true/false).

Answer: false

5. What will Google search for if you include this in your string:
develop*
What about LinkedIn?

Answer. Google will look for develop, development etc. bur NOT because of the asterisk! Google auto-stems and will do this even if you remove the asterisk. LinkedIn will include only "develop".

6. How would you search LinkedIn from Google (X-ray) to find database administrators from Canada? Note: your results must include profiles of people from Canada only and must not contain links other than profiles.

Answer: you will need to include site:ca.linkedin.com in your string

7. What are the differences between searching for people on LinkedIn from Google by X-raying and searching using the LinkedIn people search dialog? Name as many as you can.

Answer: There are many differences; let's make it a discussion here on Boolean strings! :)

8. There is a search box on the home page of Twitter. How would you search for tweets that ask questions about recruiting?

Answer: recruiting ?

9. Suggest a search string on Google that will bring up YOUR profile as one of the results on the first page; do not use your name in the string.

10. [Bonus question, to be used in case of a tie]: on major search engines, such as Google, you are restricted to review no more than 1,000 results for any given search string. What would you do to view 1,001 search results?

Answer: Google will not show more than 1,000 results at a time. But you can run several strings adding and removing a keyword, or varying the time when the pages were found, and see more.

Thanks to all 20+ members who participated!
Irina

P.S. SourceCon/ERE gave the Boolean Strings members a special discount code for SourceCon in SD in March.