LinkedIn Intern interview questions

I was contacted by a recruiter after a career fair at my university, had a brief 10 minute phone call with the recruiter the following week. She set me up with an on-campus interview for about 2 weeks after the initial phone call.

Contacted by a recruiter who found my resume online. Was scheduled to have two phone interviews: first an exploratory one, second a coding interview. In the exploratory interview, I was asked a bit about my PhD research. We then proceeded to have an open-ended discussion about machine learning/data mining challenges in designing the LinkedIn job search engine. It started off by asking how I would try to achieve some simple piece of functionality; then I was asked to identify where my approach would fail; then I was asked whether I could see how to improve the approach under more assumptions, and so on. Overall my feeling was that the interviewer was trying to gauge my grasp of when/where/how to apply ML/data mining techniques, and to test my thought process. In the coding interview, I was asked to design and code up achieve a (conceptually) simple piece of functionality for user search logs. I was not entirely successful with the implementation, as there proved to be more cases to consider than I had initially thought, and I don't think my final solution was optimally efficient. But I did think out loud throughout the process, and I think the interviewer took that into consideration when assessing me. The interviewer was not strict about me using any particular language, and I think I ended up using pseudocode.