Two Insiders Look at People Search Engines
Every Tuesday night on AltSearchEngines we host a debate between two related search engines. Tonight, Michael Tanne of Wink and Matt Dusig of yoName have graciously agreed to bring us all up to speed on some issues unique to People Search.
Wink searches the public profiles on MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, LinkedIn, Live Spaces, and other sources. They are also developing new technology to find even more people in a variety of cool ways. They also use their “PeopleRank” technology to deliver the results that people think are the best. Wink lets you find people by name, location, school, work, and interest anywhere on the web.
Wink also lets you create your own Wink profile. This enables you to have control over what people know about you. The Wink profile allows you to control your name, location, description, and other contact information. This gives you the freedom to determine what people know about you.
yoName turns your computer into a private detective. Look for anyone you want. You can even look someone up by a username or an email address! If they’re on any of the big-time networks like MySpace or Facebook, yoName will find them. Look up friends and family, look up yourself and see if someone’s impersonating you, or just have fun and look up celebrities.
From yoName: Let’s say you’re at the club and you’re flirting with this total stud (and he is way out of your league, by the way, “KC”), and, boom, you score digits. The problem is that the next day they’re still in the pocket when you toss your jeans in the wash. You remember his name, but he’s not in the book. I mean, who even uses the book anymore except to order pizza? Exactly. So now what do you do? yoName!
1. You both mention searching sites like MySpace, Friendster, Bebo, LinkedIn, LiveSpaces, and others. Is it safe to assume that top People search engines go after essentially the same sources?
The large social networks will probably be included by the people search engines that has the scale to include them, and are permitted access. Beyond these obvious good sources of people profiles, Wink is going out beyond just the social networks to include many many kinds of profile information - blogs, photos, directories, lists, news, etc. So far Wink includes nearly 250,000,000 fully indexed profiles, but it will continue to grow. Other people search engines have also said they will do more than social networks.
It makes sense that people search engines should search the sites that have the most visitors/profiles. So, for right now, it’s MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
2. Wink has ads on the search results pages, and yoName hosts paid background checks, etc. Are your business models as straightforward as that? Are there others out there that you know of?
In addition to advertising and lead generation, Wink provides people search as a syndicated service to Web sites that need a people search capability.
yoName has no true financial business model today. Banner ads will probably never cover the cost of the servers to run the site. yoName was not venture funded and is not concerned with competition, EBITDA, barriers to entry, or how the competition makes money. We’re just having fun by making tools that we want to use and hope other people will use them too. We’re not even sure there is a real business model in “people search”.
3. Many people worry about a) too much information about themselves on the Internet and b) erroneous information about themselves on the Internet. What advice would you give these people?
As far as privacy is concerned, People should be aware that information they post about themselves will show up on-line in a variety of ways - and not just because of people search engines. Most information finds a way out.
Wink recommends that people only post information and photos that they don’t mind people seeing. Don’t post street address, phone number or email address. Be careful of who you get into dialogs or exchanges with and what information you are sharing with them. If the service you use lets you control how much information is public vs. private, take advantage of that feature to set a level that you are comfortable with.
As far as accuracy, Wink allows users to “claim” their profile and edit it. That way you can make sure the information is correct, choose the photo you prefer, remove sites you don’t want listed, or add sites you do want listed.
Finally, remember that most information is public. Even some information you consider personal is a matter of public record, it’s just a matter of how hard someone wants to look for it. The two most common facts - street address and phone number - have been publicly available for decades, but on-line we tend to avoid using these. In a way, having an electronic identity that includes your blog, social network profile, and maybe IM or email can be a safer way to interact.
If someone doesn’t want to be found on yoName, it’s simple. Remove yourself from MySpace and you won’t be found.
4. Have you ever had an unusual or especially interesting search result happen on your site?
Yes we have actually had several interesting experiences. Here are two sample notes from users:
Mike: “I found a long lost friend today that I had not seen since the 8th grade. I wish you much success.”
Lena: “I’ve been looking for a lost friend since 2002 with no luck until today. I’ve tried all pay sites but none of them gave me a correct address or tel number. Thank you so much”
Not that we’re aware of.
5. What is your short to medium term goal? Where would you like to be in 2010?
In the medium term, Wink will continue to add sources and provide more and more ways to find the people you are looking for. Eventually Wink will provide a searchable directory of everyone on-line.
I’d like to be in Hawaii in 2010. OK, seriously, we have no goals or expectations for yoName. We’ll continue to build the site to meet the needs of our customers and we’ll see where the road takes us.
6. How would you characterize your relationship to the other 100+ alternative search engines that we cover? Are you looking for partnerships or any type of collaboration with them?
There are search engines providing interesting results in many different verticals. Wink’s clearly focused on the People Search vertical, which now is understood to be a pretty big area. One other thing that should be understood is that Wink is a full search engine - that means we run our own crawler, content system, indexer, and search engines - the full system required to run a full featured search engine. Some alternative search engines are really meta search engines that simply pass the search off to other sources.
We collaborate with a growing number of other services, some of which are search engines, and will continue to explore new relationships.
We are open to partnerships, but not actively seeking them out. It’s possible that other search engine sites could benefit from displaying people search information on their sites.
Thank you gentlemen, very much!
Readers, if you have a question or comment for Michael or Matt, please post it in the Comments section, and we will ask them to respond.
October 12th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
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