Kudos to Esteban & the entire search team.  We’ve begun public testing of our next generation search engine on LinkedIn.com.

LinkedIn Blog: LinkedIn Search: Finding Just Got Easier

As the largest global professional network, we’ve had the privilege of having millions of users enter over a billion professional search queries, and we’ve been working hard to build a much more robust professional people search engine. We interviewed lots of users and aggregated thousand of pieces of feedback. The end result is a completely redesigned search experience aimed at making it easier and faster to find the most relevant professionals that you’re looking for.

Esteban wrote a great blog post, so rather than replicate it here, I’ll just recommend that you click through and read about all of the new features.  We’re still in testing, so the product isn’t finalized, but it’s a top-to-bottom rearchitecture and redesign of the search engine, and I’m incredibly proud of the team.

So, check it out. There is a link in the upper right of every LinkedIn search results page to opt into the test.

Of course, if you want to cheat, clicking this link will automatically opt you in.

Let us know what you think.  I’ve been using the new search exclusively for four weeks now, and I have to say it is changing the way that I use LinkedIn.  Just the speed alone is worth the switch.