LinkedIn started rolling out a beta version of faceted people search back in July. Now it’s officially out of beta, as announced on their blog. I’ve re-posted the video above in case you missed it in July.
Interestingly, LinkedIn developed its own tool to support the combination of faceted search with social network search: Bobo-Browse (Otis mentioned it in our recent presentation to the New York CTO Club). I helped develop similar functionality when I was at Endeca, so I know how hard this problem is. LinkedIn has done an impressive job–and has applied it to one of the most valuable data sets on the web. Bravo!
But I can’t help asking for just one more thing. LinkedIn has great semi-structured data about its 50+ million members. I’d love to be able to explore that data using more facets–in particular, facets relating to people’s job skills and expertise. I hope that’s something they’re working on. Perhaps a good topic of conversation at the upcoming Workshop on Search and Social Media!
