How does LinkedIn's search algorithm work?

It strikes me that the LinkedIn search algorithm is not very robust considering the number of people that visit the website on a daily basis. For example the entire basis of LinkedIn should be company based searches using the search box, yet that sames to be the poorest of all search results. For example a search for "sales" in LinkedIn does not yield Salesforce as a company result, which you would think would be the #1 result and is by far the most popular company starting with that name in the world. Instead it yields an incomplete profile for a company calls "sales". They have a lot of room for improvement here. Many of you can make up a bunch of big words about proprietary ranking, but the sad truth is although LinkedIn's offices are right next to Google's in mountain view, their search technology is miles apart.

LinkedIn uses proprietary (and secret I pressume) algorithms to rank and order the results you get when you search for people on the site. There is no single rank for LinkedIn search. Unlike the standard search engines, a LinkedIn people search generates its relevance score uniquely for each member. As a result, even though a query will return the same results for everyone, the order is determined in part by the profile, activity, and connections of the person searching. Testing a query from a handful of users is not likely to reflect the overall rank any profile has across the millions of queries that LinkedIn has every day. A better measure would be the number of views your profile gets. Check the Who's Viewed Your Profile section on your homepage. Before they return results, they consider the searcher's activity on LinkedIn, the profiles returned by the query, and other members who have run similar searches in determining the sort order. These, along with other factors, combine to provide them with data to improve the overall quality of members' search results. More keywords aren't always better. Linkedin advice would be to only include the keywords, including repeated keywords, in your profile that best reflect your expertise and experience. If you integrate an extended list of keywords into your profile, you are likely showing up in a high number of searches. The question you need to ask yourself, however, is whether members consider your profile relevant to their search. If not, their behavior as a collective group may be influencing the algorithm used to rank you in search results.

LinkedIn only publishes vague references to how their search algorithm works. The best (repeatable) results you'll find will come from profile optimization based on keyword density. Also, this approach does NOT work on company pages. Hope that helps. Best, Frank @ MFJLabs