At the time of this article, there were 1,236,675 LinkedIn groups. With so many groups, how do you find and choose which groups to join?

Depending on your LinkedIn group strategy, you may be interested in finding the largest groups of a specific type.

LinkedIn groups are very searchable, and when you start typing letters into the search box, you will get a dynamically updated list of groups matching the letters/words you input, typically (but not always exactly) sorted by the number of members.

Being the search geek that I am, I wondered what would happen if I executed a null search – a query for nothing.

Many search engines/interfaces don’t allow null searches, and others that do tend to return only partial results. For example, with LinkedIn’s people search, you can’t search all of LinkedIn without entering a keyword – you will only get results from 1st degree, 2nd degree, and group connections. You have to enter a keyword in order to dip into the people categorized as “3rd + Everyone Else,” representing the deep end of the people pool on LinkedIn.

However, lucky for us, a null search of LinkedIn groups not only works, it returns all groups sorted primarily by the number of members. That makes it remarkably simple to find the largest groups on LinkedIn. Continue reading →