By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)

It’s a vague title but accurate considering LinkedIn is like a billion internet years old.

LinkedIn improving something is like grandpa getting a new battery for his hearing aid. Sure he still smells like cherry pipe tobacco but you won’t have to yell at him to turn down the Denise Austin VHS he picked up at the Salvation Army store.

Back to LinkedIn – they have been around a long time, but with a purpose. One look at LinkedIn and you get it. It is a business focused social networking platform. What they have been lacking for years, like grandpa, are the tools to bring it into this century.

But with a new and improved Search, released today, they are set to join this century and take on the whipper-snappers. Oh, yeah, and what appears to be an imminent new layout.

This leap forward may just start as this new advanced search but it looks like it also going other places as well. From the image that LinkedIn used in their release, a screen shot of the update in action, it is evident that the entire site around it is not the public one. Well, it sure isn’t the site I or my colleagues see when logged in.

Check them out:

Screen shot from their blog (btw, you can see top left this is a basic account and not paid).

Screen shot from the web.

I am fan of LinkedIn’s mission and business but have always only been moderately satisfied with their interface and tools – even with a business or pro account they’ve always felt limited. New search tools and an improved interface may not seem like a lot but with the powerful focus on business that they provide, it would be a no brainer to begin using the service more often than other social networks.

I would explain the new faceted search but LinkedIn has done a much better job of doing so. Here’s a video from their blog post starring their lead search engineer.

Deep down inside LinkedIn has always been the the social network that could. Hopefully, these improvements will be enough juice to put that hearing to a volume setting of 11 and the hip hop will stream through. That is what the kids listen to today, right?

Related articles by Zemanta

• The value of silence (smartblogs.com)
• New Microsoft Outlook goes social (sfgate.com)
• The new age of social media for lawyers : Assimilating what we have (kevin.lexblog.com)
• 8 Things To Consider While Building a Quality Network (rotorblog.com)