Talent SummonerBoolean Search Cheat Sheet for Recruiters (2026)
Copy-paste Boolean strings for LinkedIn, Recruiter, Google X-ray and GitHub — every operator checked against the platform's own docs, August 2026.
Every operator on this page is read from the platform's own help documentation and verified August 2026. Anything the vendor does not document is left out rather than hedged — including a few operators that other cheat sheets print as gospel.
We build Talent Summoner, an AI agent that takes a plain-English brief instead of a Boolean string — $39 a role, or $79/month if you hire every month, free to start, no credit card. If you want the argument for and against strings, read the Boolean search explainer; this page is the reference you keep open while you work.
Trade-offs, stated plainly: no contact-credit database or InMail equivalent — you reach candidates through your own channels; no always-on pipeline; no ATS integration today.
Start here: senior backend engineer, Go or Rust, Hong Kong
In Recruiter's Keywords filter, or the main search bar on LinkedIn.com:
("backend engineer" OR "software engineer" OR "backend developer") AND (Go OR Golang OR Rust) AND "Hong Kong" NOT (intern OR recruiter OR "talent acquisition")That string carries nine AND, OR and NOT operators. If it returns nothing, loosen it by dropping an OR branch or an exclusion. If you are hiring this role for real, our Hong Kong software engineer salary guide has the bands to budget against before you start messaging people.
Google X-ray, for the public profile pages:
site:linkedin.com/in "backend engineer" "Hong Kong" -intern -recruiterGitHub, for people who ship rather than list:
location:"hong kong" language:go repos:5..* type:userParentheses make the intended grouping explicit in the first string.
LinkedIn operators
| Operator | What it does | LinkedIn's own example |
|---|---|---|
| Quotation marks | Exact phrase | "product manager" |
| AND | Every term must appear | accountant AND finance AND CPA |
| OR | Any one of the terms | sales OR marketing OR advertising |
| NOT | Excludes a term | programmer NOT manager |
| Parentheses | Groups logic — the only grouping symbol LinkedIn.com recognizes | VP NOT (assistant OR SVP) |
AND, OR and NOT only work in capital letters.
What LinkedIn will not accept
| Symbol | Status on LinkedIn.com |
|---|---|
| Asterisk wildcard | Not supported |
| Square brackets, curly braces, angle brackets | Not supported — treated as ordinary characters, so they group nothing |
| Plus sign, minus sign | Not officially supported; use AND and NOT instead |
LinkedIn Recruiter specifics
- Where Boolean works: the Job titles, Companies and Keywords filters.
- Stop words: LinkedIn documents that common stop words such as by, in and with are ignored, so a phrase like "after sales" may match on "sales" alone.
- LinkedIn's own advice: be specific and inclusive rather than vague and exclusive — a set of related titles and essential skills beats a long list of exclusions.
Google X-ray operators
| Operator | What it does | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Quotation marks | Exact phrase | "product manager" |
site: | Restricts results to a domain, a URL, or a URL prefix | site:linkedin.com/in |
| Minus sign | Excludes a word | -jobs |
before: | Last updated before a date | before:2026-01-01 |
after: | Last updated after a date | after:2025-01-01 |
filetype: | Restricts to a file type | filetype:pdf |
Never leave a space between the operator and its term — Google says site:nytimes.com works and site: nytimes.com does not.
Those six are the entire list Google's operator help page offers as its popular operators. AND, OR, intitle: and inurl: appear nowhere on it, which is why no string here depends on them.
GitHub user-search qualifiers
| Qualifier | What it does | Example |
|---|---|---|
type:user | Personal accounts only, no organizations | type:user |
location: | The location on the profile | location:"hong kong" |
language: | Majority language of repositories owned | language:go |
repos:n..* | At least n public repositories | repos:5..* |
followers:n..* | At least n followers | followers:100..* |
in:login in:name in:email | Restricts the text match to one field | bolton in:name |
fullname: | Exact full name, sensitive to spacing | fullname:nat friedman |
created: | Account creation date, ISO format | created:2015-01-01..2020-12-31 |
NOT | Excludes a word, strings only | hello NOT world |
| Hyphen before a qualifier | Excludes everything that qualifier matches | -language:javascript |
GitHub search is not case sensitive, and multi-word values need quotation marks. Its non-code search syntax page documents NOT but neither OR nor AND, so widen a GitHub search by running it twice rather than by writing a longer string.
Worked example: B2B SaaS product designer
("product designer" OR "UX designer" OR "product design lead") AND (SaaS OR B2B) NOT (intern OR freelance OR agency)Do not extend that into a quoted phrase like "design in fintech" — in is on LinkedIn's ignore list, so the phrase is matched without it and the result is looser than it looks.
Worked example: machine-learning engineer with LLM experience
("machine learning engineer" OR "ML engineer" OR "research engineer") AND (LLM OR "large language model" OR NLP) NOT (intern OR student OR professor)Because LinkedIn has no wildcard, every abbreviation is a term you type yourself. That list is also the honest limit of Boolean: it can only find the words you already thought to write down.
FAQ
How do I write a Boolean search string for LinkedIn?
Combine quoted phrases for exact titles, OR groups in parentheses for acceptable variants, AND for hard requirements, and NOT for exclusions — typing AND, OR and NOT in capitals. Paste the whole string into the main search bar on LinkedIn.com, or into the Job titles, Companies or Keywords filter in Recruiter.
Does LinkedIn Boolean search support wildcards?
No. LinkedIn supports no asterisk wildcards, and no square brackets, curly braces or angle brackets — parentheses are the only grouping symbol it recognizes.
Which search operators does Google document?
Google's operator help page documents quotation marks for exact phrases, site:, a minus sign for exclusion, before:, after: and filetype:. Operators such as intitle: and inurl: are not on it, so treat any string that relies on them as unverified.
Rather skip the string entirely? Start free with a two-line brief and compare the ranked shortlist against the string you would have written.
Every operator above verified August 2026 against LinkedIn's, Google's and GitHub's own help documentation. Search syntax rots as quietly as pricing — we re-verify this page quarterly, so tell us if something changed.
