Comments on: People search engine

Question: People search engine

chips ahoy — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 17:54:29 -0800

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.

By: iconomy

iconomy — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 17:58:52 -0800

Was it Spock?

By: chips ahoy

chips ahoy — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 18:49:15 -0800

Yep. Thanks! If there are other good people-search resources out there, I'm all ears... no pun intended.

By: smoothhickory

smoothhickory — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 18:54:31 -0800

I use yoName a lot.

By: shothotbot

shothotbot — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 19:07:51 -0800

ewww, I am on spock, linked to all the politicians I have contributed to.

By: MLIS

MLIS — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 19:13:04 -0800

Wink

By: burnmp3s

burnmp3s — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 19:33:41 -0800

pipl is another one

By: hexatron

hexatron — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 20:02:47 -0800

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.

By: smackfu

smackfu — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 20:13:36 -0800

I think these services are to find the obscure people, not the ones who come up on the first page of Google.

By: Estragon

Estragon — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 20:28:46 -0800

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 Thanks to it, I discovered that my defunct friendster account had outdated relationship info for me.

By: dhartung

dhartung — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 20:55:01 -0800

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.

By: terrortubby

terrortubby — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 04:04:53 -0800

There's also spokeo for people that are in your email address books.

By: Big_B

Big_B — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 09:42:33 -0800

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.

By: Green With You

Green With You — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 10:15:10 -0800

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.