Why do the Lookup Endpoints return incorrect results sometimes?

This post applies to the following API endpoints:

• Company Lookup Endpoint
• Role Lookup Endpoint
• Person Lookup Endpoint
• Work Email Lookup Endpoint

Occasionally, our Lookup API endpoints return the wrong results. False positives, to be precise. This happens because our Lookup Endpoints is a search function. Even Google gets search results wrong.

There are two reasons why this happens:

1. If you look up a person and the target person does not have a public LinkedIn profile, our Lookup API will return the next closest match.
2. Our search is not good enough.

We are constantly working on improving #2. However, for #1, there is just nothing much we can do because the profile is not available to us to return.