Chapter 14. Case study 3: LinkedIn

 

Adding facets and real-time search with Bobo Browse and Zoie

Contributed by JOHN WANG and JAKE MANNIX

LinkedIn.com is the largest social network for professionals in the world, with over 60 million users worldwide (as of March 2010), and has “people search” as a primary feature: users on the site have fully rich profiles that act as their public professional resume or curriculum vitae. A primary feature of the site is the ability to search for other users based on complex criteria, enabling use cases such as

  • A hiring manager who wants to find potential employees
  • Salespeople who want to find leads
  • Tech-savvy executives of all levels who want to locate subject-matter experts for consultation

Search for people at LinkedIn is an extremely complex topic, complete with tremendous scalability issues, a distributed architecture, real-time indexing, and personalized search. Each search query is created by a registered user on the site who has his own individual subset of the full social network graph, which affects the relevance score of each hit differently for different searching users.

14.1. Faceted search with Bobo Browse

14.2. Real-time search with Zoie

14.3. Summary