X-ray Search Guide

All you need to know about Twitter and LinkedIn X-ray search.

What is an X-ray search?

X-Ray search, or Boolean search, is a commonly used technique to locate people with specific roles, skills and qualifications by combining keywords into the search.
X-ray search is commonly used in recruitment to source candidates or in sales to find potential buyers.
Basically, you enter the search terms and use boolean operators (like AND, OR and -) to narrow or broaden your set of results.

e.g. "Marketing Manager" AND "San Francisco" -"CRM"

What websites can I X-ray?

Free People Search Tool allows to search on:
- LinkedIn
- Twitter
- Dribbble
- GitHub

All the profiles shown are publicly available records that have been indexed by search engines.

What boolean operators should I use?

Boolean operator

"..."
‍

AND
‍

OR
‍

NOT
‍

- (minus symbol)
‍

intitle:
‍

Search type

Find an exact keyword.
e.g. "Sales Manager"

Results include all keywords linked with AND
e.g. developer AND iOS

OR provides options in your search
e.g. developer OR programmer

NOT is used for exclusion of terms.
e.g. marketing NOT director

Excludes a keyword from your search
e.g. manager -project

Filter by a current company or job title.
e.g. intitle:facebook

For complex search strings you can use brackets ( ). Brakets given priority to the elements who are inside of it.
("Managing Director" OR "CEO" OR OR "Founder") AND ("Start Up" OR "Scale Up")