Whozat? The People Search Engine. Regular readers will know of my limited enthusiasm with regards people search engines. That is to say, I've not really found a good one yet, and am still hopefully looking. Is Whozat? going to be the Holy Grail of these engines?
It calls itself a search engine designed to find and display information about people. Well yes, that's a fair start; what else would they say? Anyway, you type in your victim's first name, last night and middle name or initial. There's also an option for keywords, which is quite useful. Unfortunately, there's no location option. This is not good; even an option to limit to or exclude the US from the search would help, but no.
I tried various options for my name (phil, philip, with and without initials) and the phil bradley version with appropriate keywords came out best. The search results were not bad, to be fair. There's a summary tag, images, related queries, an opportunity (at last!) to refine by place, gender and age with a concept cloud that you can refine by, which I also have to say wasn't bad.
Behind the summary are various tags for emails, wikipedia, videos, images, friendster, (not friendfeed though), facebook, myspace and Linkedin. Nothing for Twitter, social bookmarking services, key search engines though, which I found rather odd.
Results can be narrowed in various ways - those mentioned, but also by clicking a tick/cross option with each search to narrow things down. I found using the refine by concept to be the best approach though.
It wasn't a bad experience, but equally I wasn't brimming over with confidence either - the email option only suggested one address, the Facebook option wasn't helpful, and the LinkedIn version was pretty poor as well.
I tried the engine with a few friends and library noteworthies. If I already knew who Brian Kelly and Karen Blakeman were I'd have found them pretty easily, but if I wasn't certain of the spelling it might have been a slightly different story. Of course, when you use an engine like this on 'john smith' or 'jane brown' things become harder more quickly, though again, the concept cloud did help quite a lot.
So in summary - not bad. I enjoyed the various refining methods, and on the whole it wasn't too bad. Still not 'the one' though, so the hunt shall continue.
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