A strange thing happened on the way to (once again) reviewing the search engine functions at Linkedin.com. First, when Linkedin introduced the feature “Skills and Expertise” I was put off, and even deleted them! I much prefer the personal recommendations. Those actually give you information that may help in making an informed decision. But, you can’t outrun fate so, I just ignored it. Since I get endorsements, many from people I don’t know, I began to get curious about any advantage they may have. Well, after review, I can report that the “endorsed for” feature is useless.

Whether you search from a general search engine or within Linkedin you will not be able to leverage that part of a profile. Say, I want potential clients to find me with a search query: “endorsed for” “private investigations” near a particular zip code. The only way those terms will appear is if they are in the “Background” portion of your profile — findable by searching in the “keywords” box in the advanced tool.

Even the stock categories of skills at the Linkedin Skills page doesn’t give you the minimal option of tailoring it to geographic region — although there is a graph from which you can select one. But to make matters worse, all the individuals endorsed for a specialty do not appear in the results and even among the profiles listed all the geographic regions aren’t represented in the graph!

Then again, maybe you don’t want to be associated with Linkedin’s title for your endorsed skill category.

You can find keywords in status updates through the Linkedin tool, Signal, but this just searches words in status updates and doesn’t support phrase searching. The word “Endorsed” returns a result for someone who doesn’t want to be.

Did I miss anything? Signed, Not Buying It.