Jun

Richer, More Powerful Search APIs

Ed. note: This is a post from Adam Trachtenberg, who runs LinkedIn’s Developer Network team, Adam’s working with developers and partners on making their LinkedIn integration as valuable for our users as possible Check out some of the partner integrations we announced earlier this year. And, if you are a developer please visit our Developer Network site.

It has only been a few weeks since I joined the LinkedIn Platform team, but I’m excited to get the opportunity to announce some great new capabilities that we’ve added for thousands of LinkedIn developers who are working to integrate LinkedIn into their business applications.

Search is one of the highest volume features at LinkedIn, largely because many business tasks first involve finding the right person. Today, we’re announcing a major enhancement to our Search API, based on the new faceted search engine that we made available to users earlier this year.

Read more: Search API Documentation

Faceted Search generates dynamic filters based on the results of any query submitted to the LinkedIn search engine. These filters let you quickly and easily hone a query based on a wide variety of dimensions, including current company, past company, location, relationship, industry, school, and profile language.

As a developer, this means that any query submitted to LinkedIn now has the option to return not only the results, but also important analytical information about the results. For example, a query for “product manager” might return hundreds of thousands of results, sorted by relevance for the user. With the new facets, your application will also be able to see the top companies for those results, as well as the result counts for each company.

For users, this means that the same powerful refinements that you can now make on the LinkedIn website can be made in any application that integrates LinkedIn search. We’ve also increased the throttle limits on the new API to help users and developers take advantage of this rich functionality.

In addition to this new API, we’ve also made a number of smaller enhancements in the past few weeks. We’ve enhanced our profile APIs to return additional fields like Twitter ID. We’ve also updated our Status API to allow users to send their LinkedIn status to Twitter. We’ve also added a number of new network updates types to our Network Updates API.

Expect more from us in the future. In the meantime, drop on by our forums, introduce yourself, share what you’re building, and let us know how things are going!