How do you use Boolean search to identify and monitor your competitors, customers, or industry trends?

What is this? Am I adding to an article or training a large language model? Are you integrating GPT-4 into LinkedIn? Happy to contribute if it's for a genuine article.

I use Boolean search strategically to stay ahead of competitors, customers, and industry trends. By combining specific keywords like company names, job titles, and industry buzzwords with "AND" or "NOT," I can filter relevant insights. For competitors, I track key roles and new hires; for customers, I monitor leadership shifts. When identifying industry trends, I focus on evolving skills or technologies. Boolean helps refine my search, making it precise and dynamic. As the landscape shifts, this technique empowers me to stay informed, agile, and ready to anticipate moves in a rapidly changing market.

While it is mostly used in the professional world, I've found that these search principles can also be applied to our daily lives. If you're looking for the name of a song that you can think of but remember the lyrics to, or the name of a book when you only remember some characters' names.

What can you use Boolean searching for besides my favorite, talent sourcing? You can try to find out about market trends, layoffs etc while searching on Google, here’s a simple example with only using AND and grouping the two words together by adding “ “. This is show results that have those two words together. "gaming industry" AND "layoffs" AND "united states" - this yielded 35,900 results But without a Boolean search, this yielded 17.7 million results: gaming industry layoffs United States The Boolean search limited the results, and you can keep added to words, phrases to the search to pinpoint a smaller number of results.

It also uses quotation marks in order to group together specific multi-word terms into a single criteria. E.g. While searching social media marketing will automatically find results with all three words, "social media marketing" will only show you results displaying the term in this sequential order as well. It can significantly improve your search accuracy and provide context to your search in terms of what you're looking for.

Another advanced operator is site: which can selectively bring up results from a specific website you're looking within. It could be anything from a media outlet, e-commerce to LinkedIn.

If you want to create a Google search incorporating Boolean looking into LinkedIn’s website, you can do a site to identify your competitors job postings: Site:linkedin.com/jobs/ “data analyst” AND “Tampa, Florida” The site search works well for other websites: Site:ziprecruiter.com/jobs/ “data analyst” AND “Tampa, Florida”

I combine Boolean Search with Google News & Alerts to track a variety of industry news for specific markets. Use “Press Release” in quotes conjunction with specific company names to get alerts for corporate news. If I was following the chip industry, for example, I may use “press release” (intel OR amd OR NVidia OR ampere)