Vol. 1 Issue 3- Jan. 2, 2001 - Geographic, PDF and Usenet Searching

In This Issue…
  • Narrowing Down by Geographic Location
  • Adobe PDF resume Search Examples
  • Quick and Easy Usenet Searching

NARROWING DOWN BY GEOGRAPHIC LOCATION:


Once you are confident you selected the best terms to put together an efficient keyword search you can narrow down results by geographic locations. To do this, start by adding telephone area codes, state abbreviations or zip codes.

Example: CDMA Wireless Design resume (home OR my) (602 OR 480 OR AZ)

Be careful, Google will not allow searches over ten words. The above example has 9 keywords so you could add only one more. Any more than that will return an error. Google will show you the terms after the tenth one, which were not used in the search. If you don't have enough results once you have collected everything from this search you can broaden your geographic range. Run the search again with alternate area codes representing those close enough for commute or relocation. Adversely, to reduce the range, redo the search using zip codes for a more narrow area search. Remember to run separate searches for each variation and collect your results every time.

Sometimes, when the name of a city is uncommon, you can use the city name instead of the area code. The following example can also be represented like this:

CDMA Wireless Design resume (home OR my) (Phoenix OR Scottsdale OR Tempe)

Notice there are fewer results than those from the area code example. Upon closer inspection, the results are very different. The lesson here is that it is a wise idea to do both searches (by area code and also by city name) whenever possible. Start with the area code, collect your results, then proceed with the city name search.

ADOBE PDF RESUME SEARCH EXAMPLES:

Google recently expanded its file type field search. This is extremely useful in finding resumes, corporate reports and technical documents published on the Web in formats other than HTML. By searching on Google with the command "filetype:" and adding a few keywords, we can discover a hidden source of information not frequently explored. One of the most popular document formats for corporate reports, technical documents and resumes is Adobe's Portable Document Format, or PDF.

Try this search in Google: filetype:PDF "Account Manager"

There are several Adobe PDF documents with the term "Account Manager." Note that the quotation marks limit search results to include only the natural phrase made by both words together as opposed to each word individually. This is a valuable search for sales people when we add the name of a specific company or product. By adding "Nortel Networks" to the search we get significantly fewer results.

In the next issue we will uncover how to find a wealth of unexplored resumes in other file types. Most other searches performed on the Net look for HTML pages thus overlooking this wealth of documents.

QUICK AND EASY USENET SEARCHING:

Usenet discussion forums have always been a valuable venue to debate viewpoints on just about any kind of issue spanning the full range of human discourse. Experts share their knowledge and advice by posting to forums in Usenet. Google Groups contains an archive of such postings in discussion groups dating back to 1995, representing more than 600 million posts.

At http://groups.google.com you can search through these gold "nuggets" of information. Of particular interest to recruiters are three types of documents: resumes, technical responses and signature files.

To discover resumes, go to the Google Groups home page, enter your three keywords and add the following keywords: my insubject:resume.

Like this: ASIC FPGA VHDL my insubject:resume

Simply vary your three keywords to find resumes in many other technical areas. Traditionally Usenet has been the realm of advanced technical discussions so what you will find most here are resumes for technical candidates, but not many for the soft skills professions.

People frequently go to Usenet to have a question answered. Those who answer questions, particularly very technical ones, are generally experts. This may not always be the case, however, there are enough experts in these forums to make this a worthwhile source of leads.

To find a response start with limiting your search to subjects containing the word "Re:" and then enter your keywords.

For example: insubject:re: micron SDRAM design

This search produces numerous messages you can scan through. There are no resumes here but you will read postings from people answering questions related to SDRAM and the chip design company Micron. Look for the experts providing positive answers to technical questions. In the posting you can frequently see their e-mail address and sometimes the company for which they work.

We can find postings from experts in a specific company by using the search term "author:" and then the target companies root e-mail address like this:

Enter: author:@micron.com

All the results you see there are from people with an e-mail address at Micron.com. They may not all be technically relevant but they are all from that company. You can easily scan the results to pick out postings from people who may be good leads.