Esteban Kozak's dashboard

Hi everyone,

We have now conducted a broad test of the recently revamped 3rd degree estimation algorithm, including some of the people that participated in this discussion. Thank you to those of you who provided us with your specific profiles and accounts to check.

There is good news and bad news.

The good news is that the test results show that the new algorithm is extremely accurate. The estimates were correct with a small error margin of 1% or less for all members included in the study.

This means that you should have a very high degree of confidence that the numbers you are now seeing live on the site, as of the fix last Tuesday, are fairly accurate numbers.

The bad news is that this research also demonstrated that we actually had errors previously in both directions - not only did a small fraction of users see numbers that were too low, but there were also a small fraction that saw numbers that were too high.

As mentioned in previous posts, the actual mathematics behind providing real-time estimation of 3rd degree relationship volume on a graph the size of LinkedIn is non-trivial.

We apologize for any confusion or problems that these issues may have caused.

Esteban

Sean,

Feel free to contact me directly with your LinkedIn account so I can better diagnose the issue you are reporting.

Esteban

Sean,

LinkedIn is a site with millions of members and close to half a billion connections, and its constantly changing. As a result, we’ve always provided an estimate of your third degree network size, and we’ve recently changed the way that we calculate that estimate. This change clearly affected your network size more than expected. We'll continue to roll more sophisticated estimation calculations in the near future.

I also want to remind you that with the new search, your third degree network no longer limits who will be included in your search results. Your search now goes across all 32+ million members at the same time. Therefore, network size is no longer really a useful measure of capability on LinkedIn.

Please let me know if you have more questions,

Esteban

Phil,

You can view the number of connections but you can't sort by number of connections. We'll enable the sort by number of connections very soon.

Esteban – Esteban Kozak, on December 18, 2008 23:53

Bill,

You can see the number of connections in the new search experience. Simply create a new view and select connections from the list of available fields.

Here is a link to a blog post with more details about "customized views":

http://blog.linkedin.com/2008/11/24/a... – Esteban Kozak, on December 18, 2008 19:45