LinkedIn is making a bold move to increase its value as the “go to” social network for doing business. As if its easy-to-build personal networks weren’t enough, LinkedIn’s new Signal feature puts your network’s updates front and center, and also gives you some powerful tools to put them to use. Here’s a quick overview:

Your LinkedIn home page is now centered around the shared updates from people in your network. Signal adds powerful search tools to help you dig deep into those updates.

With Signal, you can filter your search queries by network (for example, limiting to just your 1st or 2nd level connections), company, industry, recency, location, school, and Twitter hashtags. You can also save a search so you can check updated results later (useful for keeping track of a brand or employment offers).

A bar on the right displays trending most-shared headlines from various industries, including a link to show you who is sharing that news.

What do you think about LinkedIn Signal? Will you be spending more time on LinkedIn because of it?