Each card targets a specific surface — Stack Overflow, Kaggle, GitHub commits, etc.
STEP 02
Click to open in Google
The CSE opens in a new tab on Google's CSE host. Search away.
STEP 03
Bookmark your favourites
Most CSEs accept query strings — bookmark with your own template for repeat use.
tipCSEs are stable across years — Google rarely deprecates them. Curate your own list as you discover new sourcing surfaces, and submit the best ones via our contribution form (T5).
A direct X-Ray on Google is great until the surface you want gets buried under everything else Google indexes. When you already know your candidate lives on Stack Overflow, ResearchGate, Malt, or Xing, a Custom Search Engine scoped to that one surface cuts the noise before you even type a query. This page is our working list of those CSEs — the same ones we reach for, grouped by reach: General, International, and French.
Each card opens the CSE in a new tab on Google’s CSE host, where you search as normal. Say you’re after a senior Symfony dev in France: open the Stack Overflow CSE, search symfony doctrine lille, and you’re searching activity on that platform only — no LinkedIn spam, no recruiter blog posts in the way. The same trick works on GitHub for contributors, ResearchGate or Google Scholar for researchers, Xing for the DACH market, and Malt or Viadeo for French freelancers and the over-35 crowd.
Two honest notes. First, a CSE only sees what its owner configured it to index — coverage varies engine to engine, and a couple here (DSC, ZoomInfo’s US bias) we flag as approximate rather than pretend they’re exhaustive. Second, most CSEs accept a query string in the URL, so once one earns its place in your rotation, bookmark it with your own template. CSEs are stable across years; Google rarely deprecates them, so a list like this keeps paying off long after you build it.