On MyLinkedInPowerForum, LinkedIn’s Konstantin Guericke recently posted that it’s getting harder and harder to find something that you can’t find on LinkedIn:

The more people are on LinkedIn, the more likely we are to find who we are looking for . . . maybe time for some random searches to see if we can create some one-word keyword searches that don’t produce any results?

Here are some I tried:

“fluorescent” 211 results
“hornet” 114 results
“cortex” 236 results
“cognac” 145 results

It gets even harder to find companies with 100 or more employees where
nobody is on LinkedIn. I think for public companies, it may be impossible.

Up to the challenge, I did a little better than Konstantin:

“anonymity” – 56 results
“obscurity” – 25 results
“hermit” – 15 results
“isolationist” – 2 results
“budgerigars” – 2 results (a word I learned working on my profile of Richard Branson)
So I decided to resort to some slang. I thought for sure, I’d get zero results for this one:

“shizzle” – 4 results! Turns out three were apparently joke/fake profiles, but I loved this one – his title: “Subversive geek”. In context: “Worked on cell phone technology. It was the shizzle, but it didn’t make me a millionaire. Although I met a few who got filthy rich from working there.”

I did finally find a few:

“isolationism” – 0 results
“monism” – 0 results

And although there are plenty of results for gadgets (210 in my network) and widgets (127 in my network), there are zero results for “doohickey”.

One other thing I noticed in the process was a couple of very funny “similar searches”:

I’d love to see the logic behind those!

Let me know… what can you not find on LinkedIn? Also be sure to tell me if you get any weird similar search suggestions.

Author: Scott Allen  (299 Posts)

Scott Allen is a social media pioneer, helping people turn virtual relationships into real business since 2002. He is coauthor of The Virtual Handshake and The Emergence of The Relationship Economy and contributor to over a dozen books on social media, business and personal development.