People search engine

January 17, 2008 5:54 PM

A few months ago I saw a people search engine where you typed in a name and it returned profiles of online personalities matching that name, complete with contact information. Any idea what it was?

This engine seemed pretty innovative and astoundingly very complete. It was not Zabasearch (that's a phone book engine) and was not Yahoo people search, which seems to not have much content. My own Google searches are returning mostly garbage.

posted by chips ahoy to computers & internet (13 comments total)

Was it Spock?
posted by iconomy at 5:58 PM on January 17, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Yep. Thanks! If there are other good people-search resources out there, I'm all ears... no pun intended.
posted by chips ahoy at 6:49 PM on January 17, 2008

I use yoName a lot.
posted by smoothhickory at 6:54 PM on January 17, 2008

ewww, I am on spock, linked to all the politicians I have contributed to.
posted by shothotbot at 7:07 PM on January 17, 2008

Wink
posted by MLIS at 7:13 PM on January 17, 2008

pipl is another one
posted by burnmp3s at 7:33 PM on January 17, 2008

I looked for myself on Spock,Wink and pipl. They were all inferior to a simple google search. My moderately unusual name is shared by one somewhat noisy ceo and several other more obscure persons, including myself.

Wink and pipl picked up on my IMDB entry, which is totally non-informative. None linked to my or my conominous' patents. Or websites. Or publications. And there are several of each of these.

The message seems to be--google wins. It really is the 600-pound gorilla.
posted by hexatron at 8:02 PM on January 17, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

I think these services are to find the obscure people, not the ones who come up on the first page of Google.
posted by smackfu at 8:13 PM on January 17, 2008

I found the aggregation of the information by yoName mildly useful. Thanks to it, I discovered that my defunct friendster account had outdated relationship info for me.
posted by Estragon at 8:28 PM on January 17, 2008

I think all of these could be useful, but none is perfect (including Google). I'm thinking of genealogy uses as well as stalking high school girlfriends buddies.

I used to be highly google-able, with a blog and high MeFi posting and many blog backlinks. But nowadays I'm fairly obscure. None of these found my Wikipedia page, which includes my full name and city of residence, though most found at least one of my friendster, myspace, and/or linkedin profiles. It could be a shortcut if all you want is to check out some social networking sites for contact info.
posted by dhartung at 8:55 PM on January 17, 2008

There's also spokeo for people that are in your email address books.
posted by terrortubby at 4:04 AM on January 18, 2008

I came up on the first page of 12 on Spoke, and I don't show up in Google. Impressive.

More impressive is that my ex-girlfriend from years ago is now a well respected calculus professor on RateMyProfessor. Wow.
posted by Big_B at 9:42 AM on January 18, 2008

Spock found information about me from a myspace profile, but I deleted that a few days ago so I'll have to recheck when myspace officially removes my information. Also, there are a large number of people sharing my name that don't like wearing their shirts. Huh.
posted by Green With You at 10:15 AM on January 18, 2008