Unlocking LinkedIn's hidden back door

Unless I was hiring a telemarketer, using this technique would get an instant "wow, this person is a looney" from me.

You're so desperate for connections that you google people in your area and cold-call them? Sorry, that's just anti-social.

I'd say it's super-social. Anti-social is where you actively avoid meeting new people, not go out of your way to meet them. :)

LinkedIn lets you decide whether or not to have a public-facing profile. That profile is fully indexable by search engines. You can choose to turn it off.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

I wrote a script a while back to scrape people's public profiles based on Google searches like this. Two things I would add to the article:

1) You get a lot of false positives, even with very well constructed Google queries. Especially, for some reason, international users.

2) You don't actually get the person's phone number this way so you'll have to call the company's main number to reach them. This may be a problem if they don't pick up their office phone a lot -- and few people do.

I've gotten everything from recruiters to people asking for angel capital through LinkedIn. I haven't personally found any real value from it.