I first met Stephan Kim at SourceCon 2016, where he had mentioned he had read some of my articles. He had told me about Manta.com, a site he used to pull master electricians. We caught each other on Facebook the other day and were messing around with Yelp and boolean and pulled some interesting results. Shameless plug, we all wish Kim would write more, he’s got some excellent ideas (hint hint, nudge nudge). Regardless, I was showing him a search string where I was mixing boolean with natural language to pull “better” ratings for electricians.
site:www.yelp.com/biz/ (he OR she) (was OR is) “the best” “master electrician” houston (great OR good OR awesome OR excellent)
Reviews in which customers wrote that this person was “the best” or “great” or “awesome” were pulled rather than a random list. This is a trick I learned from Josh Jones when he was sourcing sales people.
Kim had searched Yelp too, but for companies that had CLOSED. In other words, he used wording to target those individuals out of the job market or from businesses that had recently been shut down:
site:http://www.yelp.com/biz AND intitle:”CLOSED” AND intitle:”boston, ma” AND electrician
Now that’s smart way to target those out on the job market (I told you this guy should write more).
So then I messed with one of my favorite Boolean operators, inanchor (which points to a link):
site:yelp.com/biz inanchor:”CLOSED” electrician and got some more viable results:
Simple variations and use of operators change the search drastically and target different areas. That’s one of the reasons SourceCon and the #CircleOfSourcing can be so powerful, it changes your way of thinking, and you tap into different parts of the brain.
We also found some interesting details searching for users and watchers on YouTube (including some phone numbers).
site:youtube.com/watch “master electrician” Boston
site:youtube.com/user “master electrician” Boston
This just goes to show you how much impact meeting another thinker at SourceCon can be. Different ideas, several variations, and new techniques all through a Facebook chat window. That’s the #CircleOfSourcing.