LinkedIn Geo: “Mapping” the Network
Recently, you may have noticed some small changes in the way LinkedIn handles geographic locations, including an enhanced People Search for the US, UK and Canada. With this week's release, we've significantly improved this effort by migrating 14 other countries to this new system, including Germany, France and India. With this expansion, we've also integrated geography into various features throughout the site. Let's have a look...
Jobs Radius Search
Now, when you search for jobs around a specific postal code, you'll find all jobs within a 25 mile (40 km) radius of that postal code. On the advanced job search page, you can narrow or broaden this radius depending on your commuting requirements. This is a significant improvement from our previous system, especially outside of the US, and we hope job seekers will find this feature useful.
Improved regions
We also changed the way we display regions throughout the site. The Profile, Network Stats, Services, My Connections and Answers pages have been enhanced to display more specific regions (outside the US). You'll notice people in your network now live in 'London', 'Paris' and 'Bangalore' instead of 'the UK', 'France', and 'India'. Have fun exploring your newly "mapped" network!
People Radius Search (For Premium Members)
Finally, we've also modified our People Search to include the same radius search ability that we added to Jobs Search. This feature was widely requested by our premium members-especially recruiters--so we're rewarding them with exclusive access to this powerful People Search functionality-they can now search as small as a 10 mile (15 km) radius. Basic LinkedIn members can still limit People Searches by distance, only the radius is fixed to 30 miles (50 km) in Europe and 50 miles (80 km) elsewhere.
LinkedIn Geo: Made possible by...
We'd also like to collectively thank geonames.org for their generous donation of international postal code data, as it made our job of mapping postal codes to latitude/longitude coordinates for over 14 million members much easier.
And most importantly, I'd like to thank you in advance for your feedback. Feel free to suggest improvements to LinkedIn Geo by commenting on this blog post.
Nick is a Principal Software Engineer who's better known at LinkedIn as the reigning Guitar Hero and Puzzle Bobble champion. All challengers are welcome to bring it on, anytime :)