How to Use Boolean Search on LinkedIn and Google

Boolean search works best when you know which service will read the query. AND, OR and NOT express useful logic, but platforms do not share every operator.

Build the logic first

Decide what must appear, which alternatives are acceptable and what would make a result irrelevant. For a marketing hiring search, that might mean a strategy role, either social-media or community experience, and no internship listings.

Start with a short query. Inspect the first results before adding another exclusion: a relevant profile may mention an old role you did not intend to filter out.

Use LinkedIn’s documented syntax

LinkedIn’s Boolean guide supports uppercase AND, OR and NOT, straight quotation marks for phrases and parentheses for grouped alternatives. For example:

("social media" OR "community manager") AND strategy NOT intern

In this example, OR allows either phrase, AND adds strategy, and NOT excludes intern. Parentheses keep the alternative phrases together.

LinkedIn says wildcard asterisks are unsupported, and + and – are not officially supported as substitutes for AND and NOT. Do not paste a syntax example from another service and assume it will behave the same way.

Adapt the query for Google

Google documents quotation marks for an exact word or phrase, site: for a particular site and a leading minus sign to exclude a word. To look for Digital Boom’s crisis coverage, try:

site:adigitalboom.com "social media" crisis -jobs

Keep the colon attached to the domain. This example narrows a web search; it does not reproduce every LinkedIn filter.

Treat advanced operators as service-specific

Commands such as NEAR/10, strict: and matchcase: appeared in the previous guide without a named supporting service. They are not offered here as general search syntax. Check the documentation for the platform and search field you are actually using.

Good search is an editing process: start with the central term, check the results, then adjust the query. For examples worth researching, browse Digital Boom’s social media case studies.