Needless to say, AROUND is one of my beloved operators for X-ray search. It helps build the search around any element of the website or a search term, in other words, “anchor” the search. We call “anchors” the repetitive elements which hint at a certain structure of webpage blocks. Have a look at your LinkedIn page: every single profile will have “connections”, “education”, “skills”, etc. Thus, all these words may be considered anchors for your search.
So what does AROUND operator do?
AROUND ties any two elements of the search, a.k.a. proximity search:
Term 1 AROUND(n) Term 2 suggests that Term 1 will be distant from Term 2 by n (number of words).
By the way, ( ) are not required and the operator performs equally well with no ().
Let’s get practical and have a look at recruiters who work presently at Amazon:
site:linkedin.com/in intitle:recruiter Amazon AROUND(15) present:
The only inconvenience with AROUND operator is that you cannot combine multiple AROUNDs in one search string as it will break the syntax and return error results.
Multi-AROUND Method
Last week during Dueling Sourcers Show with Mike Santoro I discovered multi-AROUND(n) method. Definitely, it is a game changer to bundle different search terms together. This hack was first introduced by Irina Shamaeva. In this case, the syntax will look as follows:
[Term 1] AROUND n [Term 2] AROUND n [Term 3], where n is any given number of words that would distance the terms.
Let’s have a look at recruiters who reside in Ontario and who presently work at Amazon:
site:linkedin.com/in [Recruiter] AROUND 15 [Amazon] AROUND 15 [present] AROUND 15 [Ontario]
(Just paste it into your Google search bar and see what’ll happen 
).
Note:
- AROUND as an operator should be capitalized and the use of [] for your search terms is a must. Otherwise, the magic won’t work
- “15” – any random number to mark the proximity of the search terms
This string intends to give a gist of the multi-AROUND functionality that opens endless possibilities to create different strings, for instance, capturing different attributes in natural language queries.
