Filtering Scam Posts - How to use the Upwork Advanced Search Feature

[#1]

Hi everyone,

I know a lot of people are talking about the overwhelming number of scam posts that are showing up in their feeds. I'm really sorry that's currently part of day-to-day life on Upwork, but there may be some workarounds available to keep you from having to sort through all of those scam posts.

If you're looking through the job posts, one thing that might helpful in filtering them is learning to use the advanced search features. This will help you to filter out posts with contact information (like scam posts with Telegram contact info).

1. Go to the search window and click the Advanced Search link you see below it. 

2. When the Advance Search window opens, you can type in your search terms.

3. An important thing you can also do in this search is exclude terms. In the screen shot, I've typed in t.me.

4. When you hit the Search button, your search will be converted to a more complex search that uses AND, OR, and NOT.

5. For some reason, Upwork's Search seem to convert t.me into (t OR me), which may not help to filter posts with Telegram info. But you can just type it into the search box once you close the Advanced Search form.

So you can type your terms into the form.


Then hit the green Search button, and Upwork's Search feature will convert it into a search term. And you can see that the period is left out.

But you can just type it in.


I hope this helps! While it won't filter out all scam posts, it will help with those that include some types of contact information. You can also type in other terms to exclude, like @gmail.com or any others. You may have to go through the same steps to put the periods into the search terms.

[#2]

If we can do this, so can...

[#3]

Oh, totally!!! But they're not, so we need to.
I think "needs must" is the British expression for this.

[#4]

Great stuff, Renata.

Too sorry Upwork is making us do the work they should be doing!

[#5]

Looks like you've been busy too! This looks amazing, Wassim:

https://community.upwork.com/t5/Freelancers/Upwork-Scam-Post-Detector-Chrome-Extension/m-p/1048524#M...

I don't use Chrome that often, but I'm going to check it out later.

[#6]

Wonderful share, dear Renata!  Thank you for being here.🤗

[#7]

Hi Yi,

I hope it helps people to find what they need.

I like researching, so I'm always fooling around with ways to search for things. It occurred to me that Upwork freelancers might not all be familiar with Boolean searches (the ones that you see in the screen shots that include AND, OR and NOT). You can do Boolean searches on most search engines, and you can use the Upwork Andvanced Search form to create them for you. The principles are fairly easy. The word AND used with two search terms creates a search that filters for results containing both terms. OR used with two search terms creates a search that pulls up results for both terms. NOT used with search terms excludes those terms.

If you like logic puzzles, you can fool around with those to tweak your search results.

If you don't like logic puzzles, you can just use the Advance Search form and hit the Search button. It should create the kind of search you need.

[#8]

Thank you so much for the detailed explanation, dear Renata. I really wish more freelancers have a chance to understand the important value of the Boolean searches, before falling victim to scams. Thank you for your time and effort. You rock!🤗

[#9]

I just wish Upwork would use something like this to filter posts before they go up. There are hundreds of them going up every day, and they should not be posted in the first place.

[#10]

Same here. Unfortunately, until the situation finally hits the company's bottomline, I am afraid our freelancers will have to carry the burden. 

Perhaps the company worries removing the obvious scam posts will prompt more sophisticated online scams, and it will make things even more troublesome. Perhaps there is a strategic thinking behind that isn't shared with us, but only with the leaders and executives. But I have stopped wasting time pondering on such questions. A positive approach, as what you have shared with us, is a more suitable solution for our freelancers. 

Thank you so much, dear Renata, for sharing and caring. 

[#11]

Does Upwork have a formal process for submitting feedback in way that is taken seriously? Or do we all just go on here and hope they see it?

[#12]

Hi Jen,
I'm assuming you mean something different than starting a ticket. I don't know the process for that sort of formal complaint. You could just start a topic and ask that on the forum.

Just so you know, I'm not a moderator and I don't work for Upwork. I just started this because it occurred to me that people might not know there were some filtering options available that they could use with the search feature.

[#13]

Thank you! I am going crazy with all these scam posts!

[#14]

Hey Laila,

I'm happy it helps! I was looking at the crazy number of scam posts and wondering how anyone could find anything.

[#15]

Thanks and it is helpful. The downside is that by us filtering out unverfied payment methos as one way of reducing the scams in our feeds, we are undoubtedly also missing out on legitimate job oportunities and making money, of which, Upwork gets a cut. So they are also missing out on making money because of us having to filter those posts out. And legitimate clients with unverified payment are also suffering because their posts are getting blocked by us.

[#16]

To expand a little bit on what Renata posted: you can combine the advanced search options with the other filters on category, cost, and, yes, payment verified if you must. To get to those filters, just click search with an empty search box for the main job feed. From there, you can choose whatever filters you want and then enter keyword filters like Renata suggested.

Here’s a sample of one of my saved searches that selects all Writing subcategories except Editing and Proofread (I have a separate search for that category since it’s my main one):

(editor OR edit) AND NOT (NFT OR crypto OR cryptocurrency OR romance OR bit.ly OR SEO OR ghostwriter OR copywriter OR turnitin OR blockchain OR ICO OR t.me)

Some of those exclusion keywords are for scams and some are just to exclude topics I don’t work on.

[#17]

Thanks, Wes.

This is a link to a LinkedIn pdf that provides more details on what you can do with Boolean searches.

https://www.mcgill.ca/caps/files/caps/gcs2014_linkedinbooleansearchtips.pdf

In Wes' example, (editor OR edit) will search for all postings that include those two terms.
Because that will probably bring up a lot of search results, including ones he's not interested in, he's limiting his search by adding AND NOT and then adding terms for everything he doesn't want in parentheses with OR between the 12 terms that describe the things he's not interested in.

AND NOT (NFT OR crypto OR cryptocurrency OR romance OR bit.ly OR SEO OR ghostwriter OR copywriter OR turnitin OR blockchain OR ICO OR t.me)

So you could just cut and paste this example and add your own terms:

(keyworkd1 OR keyword2) AND NOT (contact1 OR contact2 OR contact3)

You might want to search with something like this (keyworkd1 OR keyword2) AND NOT ("t.me" OR @gmail OR whatsapp OR "kindly message via telegram")

I think that should work. Someone might want to test it out because I haven't yet.

[#18]

Ravi, a longtime freelancer on Upwork, did this search and posted it on a different forum thread:


https://www.upwork.com/nx/jobs/search/?q=Please%20don%E2%80%99t%20apply%20if%20you%E2%80%99re%20not%...

If you're seeing posts with the same wording a lot, you can also use the common word strings you notice as excluders by putting the them inside quotation marks:
(editor OR edit) AND NOT ("Please don’t apply if you’re not from" OR crypto OR cryptocurrency)

I usually try to cut those down to the smallest common word strings. One I see fairly frequently is "if you can do the project, text the Asst. Staff", but I would try to a shorter portion of that ("text the Asst. Staff") because occasionally, they do shake up the word order.

I used those words to do a search and got 73 hits.
https://www.upwork.com/nx/jobs/search/?q=%22text%20the%20Asst.%20Staff%22&sort=recency&page=4

So you could use that as an excluder in your Boolean search:
(editor OR edit) AND NOT ("Please don’t apply if you’re not from" OR "text the Asst. Staff" OR ghostwriter OR romance)

[#19]

Renata this is amazingly helpful and so are you!  💖💖💖

[#20]

I totally agree on both counts. This also has to be one of the  best posts in the forums (not forgetting Wassim's post, Petra's infographic and Wes's scam breakdown.)

[#21]

If I want to filter job posts that have an email address that is e.g. somename@domain.com will AND NOT (@) do the job and are there wildcard/joker characters AND NOT (*@*.*)?

[#22]

Hi Esad,

Great idea. I actually located the support page about the Advanced Search: https://support.upwork.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500007921782-Advanced-Search-Techniques-for-Finding-Jo...

It looks like * is the only wildcard available. 
(For those who don't know, a "wildcard" is a search symbol that can be used as a placer for any character or string of characters.)

I just tried AND NOT (*@*). That works on email addresses and other types of contact information. I tried AND NOT (*@*.*), and this works as well.

An important thing to mention is that this doesn't exactly work if you type it into the "exclude these words" box in the Advanced Search form and hit search. The search that will be returned only contains the brackets with nothing in them. If I'm looking for translations jobs in Brazil, and I use the exclude terms box to type in *@*, it returns a search that looks like this:




But you can just type the term into the brackets.


One nice thing is that you can do your search and then type in new terms to refine it further. And the search isn't case sensitive. So I can type whatsapp or WhatsApp and it will work.

[#23]

Hi Renata,

Thank you for your effort and for sharing information with the community.

The last time I tried to use this (several months ago), it didn't work very well. Probably Upwork has fixed it in the meantime.

I'll have to try to set everything up again.

[#24]

I think I tried it before with the + and - operators. According to that help page, it doesn't support those. Also, you need to type NOT, AND, and OR in uppercase.

Another good thing is that you can save the searches, so you don't have to type all of that out all the time.

[#25]

This is very helpful, Thanks.