For forever LinkedIn has had really poor search. Here’s an example I ran across today.

I was searching for CEOs in Boston area companies with 50-1000 employees, etc. And I noticed that one company had 3 CEOs (actually more than one company had multiple CEOs).

Here were the results:

LinkedIn search result

One person was the real CEO.

One person was in the office of the CEO. (Okay, CEO was in their title at the company, so that’s understandable.)

And one person works at the company and is the CEO at another company that doesn’t have 50-1000 employees.

It’s this third case which is especially annoying because it happens all the time. It makes searches less useful, and it means that some of your ad spend on LinkedIn that is targeted by title is wasted – maybe a lot of it. (The modern version of “I know that half of my advertising dollars are wasted, I just don’t know which half.”)

poor LinkedIn search result

LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, which has some of the most sophisticated search technology in the world. It can’t do better than that?