Basic profile search scraper
We refer to the Basic profile search as the search located at https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/. We have the Profile Search API endpoint to scrape this page - it accepts search input parameters like name, location, current company, etc., and page number for pagination. The scraper returns a list of search items (not profiles, see below why) matching the search criteria. This search can usually find a limited number profiles when searching by name.When searching by other queries (for example, by job title), this is how the search page looks like to our scrapers. Most of the search results are anonymized and displayed as
“LinkedIn Member” without a profile link. We cannot scrape these profiles.
The scraper will return these search items, though generally they are not useful.
If you compare it to browsing the search with your personal LinkedIn account,
you will find more exposed profile links due to your number of LinkedIn connections.
Our basic profile search scraper won’t be able to extract the same number of search results.
To work this around, you can pass you own LinkedIn account to the scraper.
If you use your personal account without a premium subscription, you will hit LinkedIn’s monthly quota
for searches pretty quickly.LinkedIn’s business model depends on users paying for searches (and not getting away with search results cheaply). So either way, they won’t simply allow us to extract search results. Even LinkedIn’s Business Premium subscription still limits your search results to 3rd-degree connections because this subscription is not top-tier, and they expect you to pay more. While you will be able to extract more profiles, you will miss many profiles due to LinkedIn hiding them behind the “LinkedIn Member” label.
Premium profile search scraper
We have a solution that can scrape all profiles from a search without missing profiles due to the"LinkedIn Member" issue.
Our premium search scraper is available currently on Apify.The API for this search is still under development and not publicly available yet. Please contact us at contact@harvest-api.com or on Discord to get early access to the premium profile search. The pricing will be $0.1 per request due to the high complexity, LinkedIn’s extreme measures, and the very high expenses it involves in scraping it. But stay tuned for updates. Once we figure out how to reduce the scraping cost, we will be able to lower the price (no estimates yet). The Premium profile search scraper currently won’t be able to handle very large values (more than 50,000 profiles at a time); please check this information if you plan to use it at scale