Boolean logic and search operators

When English mathematician George Boole invented Boolean logic in 1847, he might not have guessed that recruiters all over the world would be using his logic today to find candidates.

Recruiters use the Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT (-) before or in between keywords so they can specify their search strings and find the people they want.

Boolean logic works in most search engines, whether it’s Google, Yandex or Bing, or platforms like LinkedIn and GitHub.

For most search engines a lot of advanced operators work to specify the search in addition to the Boolean operators.

Each operator has its own function.

The power of search operators is demonstrated with the following example:

When you search for the following search string in Google for candidates you don’t really get the desired results, take a look;

linkedin sales representative saas amsterdam

What you get is a bunch of job boards, not what we're looking for!

But if you add some nice little operators the search looks like this;

site:linkedin.com/in intitle:"sales representative" saas amsterdam

In this search we only get LinkedIn profiles as results with people who have sales representative in their job title.

That’s more like it.

In this guide we’ll go through which operators there are, what they mean and how you can use them.

Basic operators

Some of the most frequently used operators are AND, OR and NOT. But also brackets ( ) and quotations “ ” are really helpful in targeting and structuring your search. The site: operator is one of the most useful operators to begin your search with if you are searching for profile results from specific platforms or websites.

Site:

Tells the search engine to look for results in a particular site. You can use this operator to look for candidates on websites and niche platforms where you know your target group is. You can use the domain name of a website (like linkedin.com) or more specific urls (like linkedin.com/in). You don’t have to include www. Or https://

Example 1

You want to find LinkedIn profiles only.

site:linkedin.com/in engineer

Example 2

You want to search niche platforms like Stack Overflow where you know your candidates have profiles and are active.

site:stackoverflow.com/users engineer

AND

Tells the search engine to look for keyword X AND keyword Y. Most search engines handle a space like AND, so you can choose to use a space between keywords instead of AND.

Example 1

You’re looking for an engineer that has as well Angular as Node.js in their profiles, so you use the AND operator (or a space) between those keywords.

site:nl.linkedin.com/in engineer JavaScript node.js

Example 2

You’re looking for a sales candidate that speaks Mandarin and lives in Amsterdam, so you use the AND operator (or a space) between those keywords.

site:linkedin.com/in sales mandarin amsterdam

OR

Tells the search engine to look for keyword X OR keyword Y. By adding OR operators you usually broaden your search because you allow more variations of keywords.

Example 1

You’re looking for an engineer that has either Angular or Typescript in their profiles because you assume some engineers will mention only either one of those. 

site:nl.linkedin.com/in engineer (Angular OR Typescript)

Example 2

You want to search for talent that has worked for leading tech companies. You want to look for talent that has worked for either Google, Microsoft or Amazon.

site:linkedin.com/in sales (Google OR Microsoft OR Amazon)

NOT (-)

Tells the search engine to exclude keywords, phrases or domains. In the case of Google the - is used in front of the keyword. In some other search engines NOT is used in front of the keyword.

Example 1

You’re looking for experienced professionals and not for interns, you exclude words like “Intern”, “Trainee” and “Summer Analyst”.

site:linkedin.com/in marketer -intern -trainee

Example 2

You’re looking for an engineer who is not focussed on leading a team but on coding, you exclude team lead profiles by putting the '-' in front of keywords and phrases like “Team lead”.

site:nl.linkedin.com/in engineer (Angular OR node.js) -"Team lead"

Quotations “ ”

Tells the search engine to search for an exact phrase. Keywords within the quotation marks should be occurring exactly as they are spelled and in the same order.

Example 1

You are looking for a growth marketer. You want to search for the words growth and marketeer in the same phrase. 

site:linkedin.com/in "growth marketeer"

Example 2

You are looking for people who indicate that they are open for work. You include the phrases “open to work” and “open for opportunities” to your string. 

site:linkedin.com/in "growth marketer" "open for opportunities"

Brackets ( )

Tells the search engine to group certain keywords so you can combine them and separate others. You can use the brackets ( ) to organize your search string with separate combinations of keywords. 

Example 1

You have three optional skills that you are looking for, you want to find the candidates who have either one of those. You include the optional skills as keywords between brackets separated by OR statements: (Keyword1 OR Keyword2 OR keyword3).

site:linkedin.com/in sales (saas OR fintech OR finance)

Example 2

You want to look for candidates from specific companies and separate those company keywords from other keywords that you’re using in the search string. So you include the company names as keywords between brackets separated by OR statements: (Company1 OR Company2 OR Company3).

site:linkedin.com/in sales ("open to work" OR "looking for opportunities") (microsoft OR google)

Advanced operators

Some operators are less often but can be equally powerful and help you make your search more targeted.

Intitle:

Tells the search engine to look for the keyword in the title section. What is seen as the title depends on the format of the website that returns the results. This can be for example the job title in a LinkedIn profile but the title can also be the title of a blog on a website. 

Example 1

You are looking for a candidate who is currently a sales executive in a company. You include the intitle: operator followed by “sales executive”.

site:linkedin.com/in intitle:"sales executive"

Example 2

You want to find team members that are presented on company websites. You use the intitle: operator to look for “our team” since that indicates a description of a page on a website that presents the company’s team.

intitle:"our team" cto

Inurl:

Tells the search engine to look for the keyword in the URL of the page. This is useful because a URL usually tells you what kind of page you are looking at, not just what is written on it. Profile pages, CVs and team pages tend to live under predictable paths, so inurl: keeps those and throws the rest away. It also works with a minus sign in front of it, which is often the more powerful move: -inurl: strips out a whole class of pages in one go.

Example 1

You want to find CVs that people published on their own site or on a file host, rather than profiles on a platform.

inurl:cv "data engineer" amsterdam -vacancy

Example 2

You want Stack Overflow user profiles, but questions and answers make up almost the whole site. You keep the profile pages with inurl: and drop the threads with -inurl:.

site:stackoverflow.com inurl:users -inurl:questions javascript

Filetype:

Tells the search engine to return only files of a given type. This is one of the small set of operators Google actually documents in its own search help, alongside site:, quotes and the minus sign, so it is safe to build a routine on. The rest of the operators in this guide are tolerated rather than promised, which matters more than it sounds (see the next section).

For recruiters the point of filetype: is that the most useful documents about people are often not web pages at all. They are the CV someone uploaded, the conference programme with the speaker list, the association member roster, the grant application with the research team on the cover. Those are PDFs, and a PDF is invisible to most sourcing tools while being perfectly indexable by Google.

Example 1

You want actual CVs rather than profiles, so you ask for PDFs containing CV language and exclude the job boards that publish CV templates.

filetype:pdf "curriculum vitae" "data engineer" amsterdam -template -vacancy

Example 2

You want the speaker list from conferences in your niche, because a conference speaker is a self-selected expert with their employer printed next to their name.

filetype:pdf "speakers" devops conference amsterdam

Before: and after:

Tell the search engine to only return documents dated before or after a given date, written as YYYY-MM-DD. Google documents both, and they are the fastest way to stop a search from handing you results that were true three years ago. They also combine, so after:2026-01-01 before:2026-04-01 gives you a quarter.

The honest caveat matters here. Google applies these to its own estimate of a document's date, and that estimate is weak on pages that change constantly, which is exactly what a profile page is. Use after: to find recent job posts, funding news and articles (useful for building a target company list), and do not trust it to tell you when a candidate last touched their profile.

Example 1

You want companies that announced a funding round recently, because they are the ones about to hire.

"series b" fintech amsterdam after:2026-01-01

AROUND(X)

Tells the search engine that two keywords must appear within X words of each other. It sits in the gap between a plain AND (the two words appear somewhere on the page, possibly hundreds of words apart) and a quoted phrase (the words appear in exactly that order, touching). Proximity is often what you actually mean: "product" and "fintech" near each other usually signals a fintech product person, while the same two words at opposite ends of a profile signal nothing.

Two warnings. AROUND must be in capitals, because around(3) in lowercase is ignored and quietly treated as an ordinary keyword, which gives you results that look fine and are wrong. And Google has never documented AROUND, so it works until one day it does not. It is worth using and not worth depending on.

Example 1

You want people whose profile ties product work to fintech, not people who happen to mention both somewhere.

site:linkedin.com/in "product manager" AROUND(3) fintech

Operators that no longer work

A Boolean guide ages badly, and the honest thing to do is say which parts have died. Google has retired more operators than it has added, and old sourcing cheat sheets (including older versions of this one) still circulate with strings that quietly return nothing useful. If a search feels broken for no reason, check this list first.

The biggest recent loss is not an operator at all. In September 2025 Google stopped honouring the &num=100 URL parameter, which for years let you pull 100 results onto one page instead of 10. Google never apologised for it and never really announced it: a spokesperson simply confirmed that "the use of this URL parameter is not something that we formally support" - Search Engine Land. That is the useful lesson buried in a dry sentence: every operator in this guide is something Google tolerates, not something it owes you, and the undocumented ones can vanish on a Tuesday. For sourcers it means the volume workflow is gone: a big X-ray string now has to be paged through ten results at a time. It is also why the earlier examples in this guide no longer carry that parameter.

The cache: operator, once the standard way to read a profile as Google last saw it, was retired in 2024 and now returns nothing - Search Engine Land. Google now links to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine from its "About this result" panel instead, which is where that habit should move.

Three more are worth knowing because they appear in almost every cheat sheet older than a few years: link: (find pages linking to a URL) and info: are both gone, the + operator for forcing an exact keyword was removed long ago and its job now belongs to quotation marks, and the ~ synonym operator no longer does anything. None of them error. They just fail silently, which is worse, because the search still returns results and you have no signal that the operator was ignored.

Where Boolean runs out

Boolean is free, transparent and nobody can take it away from you, and it still has three hard limits that no amount of string craft fixes. Knowing them is what separates a sourcer who uses X-ray well from one who over-trusts it.

First, you are not searching LinkedIn. You are searching Google's index of the public, logged-out version of LinkedIn, which is a subset, and a stale one. If someone changed jobs last month, Google may still be serving their old title, and intitle: will match on it. Second, you can only search words that are actually on the page. Headcount of the employer, years in a role, whether the person is on a visa, whether they have been contacted five times this month: none of that is text on a public profile, so no operator can reach it. Third, since the loss of &num=100, working a wide string at volume is genuinely slow.

The way out of the first two is a structured database, where you filter on fields instead of guessing which words a profile happens to contain, and where each record carries a contact detail rather than just a URL. That is a different tool with a different failure mode, and the cost is that you are trusting somebody else's data collection instead of Google's. Apollo is the usual first stop because it has a real free tier, which suits the reader who came to this guide precisely because it costs nothing. Platforms built for recruiters, such as HeroHunt.ai, take the same idea further by running the search and the outreach together.

Putting a string together

The operators are easy. Ordering them is the skill, and the order that works is almost always the same. Start with site: to pick the pool you are fishing in, because it throws away more junk than anything else you can type. Then use intitle: or a quoted phrase to pin the one thing the person must be. Then widen with a bracketed OR group for the variations you are willing to accept, because your target does not describe themselves the way your job description does. Only then start excluding with the minus sign, and exclude one thing at a time so you can see what each removal costs you.

The mistake almost everyone makes is building the whole string in one go and then wondering why it returns four results. Boolean is subtractive: every operator you add can only ever shrink the set, except OR. So build it in that order, run it after each addition, and watch the result count. When the count falls off a cliff, the last thing you typed is the thing to question, and usually it is an exclusion that was too broad or a quoted phrase that nobody actually writes about themselves.

George Boole gave us three operators in 1847 and they have outlived nearly every search product built on top of them. The operators Google has taken away in the last two years were all conveniences. AND, OR, NOT and quotation marks are still standing, still work on Google, Bing, LinkedIn and GitHub alike, and are still the cheapest sourcing skill you will ever learn.