123people is a new people search engine that has been getting a bit of coverage recently, so I thought it was time that I took a look at it. It has a simple Google like interface and you're prompted for Firstname Lastname, and have a choice of Austria, Germany, Switzerland, US or the World. A slightly odd set of options which may be explained by the fact that it's German based. However, to title itself 'The European People Search Engine' is slightly disingenuous I think.
A search brings up a huge amount of data; weblinks, images, videos, social network profiles, email addresses, phone numbers, blogs, biographies, documents, Amazon links and Instant Message accounts. All of this information is presented on one page of results, with tabs to be more specific and a tag cloud to focus on a particular aspect of a name. I found the display of results to be reasonably clear, though it does lead to a long page!
Of course, I did a search for my name, and got a mixed bunch of results. None of the 20 emails that were returned were mine which was a little disappointing. The system was intelligent enough to work on variations such as pbradley but it wasn't able to expand out to philipbradley which would then have picked up my Gmail address for example. It did find me on Twitter though, and found a couple of the few images of me on the net. Although it didn't find any of the videos that I've put onto YouTube it did find one that referenced me which I found slightly amusing. The weblinks were fine and pulled up both me, the baseball star and the singer, although the porn star didn't get a mention, despite an image of him. The blog search function was equally acceptable, and 123people also found me on several networking sites.
As far as it goes, 123people is fine. I'd like to see much wider coverage however, and I think it needs to expand coverage not only geographically, but also in terms of the resources that it searches - Netvibes, Pageflakes, Slideshare and so on all need to be indexed. It would also make sense to cover Amazon from the point of view of authorship, rather than simply profiles.
If you're not impressed with this one, try yoName for social media coverage, Pipl or Wink, Spock, PeekYou for a general search, or ZoomInfo for people or companies.
A search brings up a huge amount of data; weblinks, images, videos, social network profiles, email addresses, phone numbers, blogs, biographies, documents, Amazon links and Instant Message accounts. All of this information is presented on one page of results, with tabs to be more specific and a tag cloud to focus on a particular aspect of a name. I found the display of results to be reasonably clear, though it does lead to a long page!
Of course, I did a search for my name, and got a mixed bunch of results. None of the 20 emails that were returned were mine which was a little disappointing. The system was intelligent enough to work on variations such as pbradley but it wasn't able to expand out to philipbradley which would then have picked up my Gmail address for example. It did find me on Twitter though, and found a couple of the few images of me on the net. Although it didn't find any of the videos that I've put onto YouTube it did find one that referenced me which I found slightly amusing. The weblinks were fine and pulled up both me, the baseball star and the singer, although the porn star didn't get a mention, despite an image of him. The blog search function was equally acceptable, and 123people also found me on several networking sites.
As far as it goes, 123people is fine. I'd like to see much wider coverage however, and I think it needs to expand coverage not only geographically, but also in terms of the resources that it searches - Netvibes, Pageflakes, Slideshare and so on all need to be indexed. It would also make sense to cover Amazon from the point of view of authorship, rather than simply profiles.
If you're not impressed with this one, try yoName for social media coverage, Pipl or Wink, Spock, PeekYou for a general search, or ZoomInfo for people or companies.
Thanks for a great post. I just found a visual people search site, called www.MarketVisual.com
Posted by: Carter Power | October 28, 2008 at 04:23 PM