I’d like to thank Alex Algard, the CEO of WhitePages.com, for sparing an hour of his time yesterday to talk to me not just about WhitePages and their acquisition of Snapvine, but about People Search in general, and how his company fits into that vertical. When I think of People Search at AltSearchEngines, I think of Alts like Wink, PeekYou, Spock, yoName, ZabaSearch, WhoZat?, Copenda, Pipl, and PeopleFinders, et al.

One of the first dichotomies that Alex discussed was, “Are you looking for someone, or is someone looking for you?” Nowadays, with the Internet, that can be very important.

Let’s say for starters that you are looking for someone. Alex pointed out that the older someone is, the more likely that their contact information is not found on the Internet, but on more traditional databases, so you would want to know if a people search engine was just crawling the Internet or doing more than that. This one of the areas that makes WhitePages.com more accurate than some of the other people search services. By gathering information from a variety of sources, both online and off, WhitePages.com has accurate listings for the majority of adults in all demographics, not just those that publish their info on social networking sites that tend to skew younger.

There is also the rapidly growing trend of finding all of our cell phone numbers and email addresses. In order to protect you from marketers, WhitePages will not just give out that information. Using Snapvine’s technology, Whitepages will let you leave a voice message which you can listen to and decide whether or not you want to contact that person. WhitePages gives consumers control of their information. Privacy options exist on their site which allow users to remove themselves from their listings.

One other factor is how much information is the people search engine displaying? Nowadays it can easily be your name, regular phone number and address. Oh, and photo, employer, spouse, relatives, birth place, social networks, public information such as real estate records, divorce and criminal records (if any), and so on.  Here are some (fuzzy, sorry) snippets from other people search engines:

The darker flip side of People Search is simply - who is searching for you? Tracking your every move?

Who’s Searching For Me? Who are these people?

30 Searches for Charles Knight

• A 47-year-old female living in Staunton, VA
• 14 people aged 41 - 51
• 18 women
• 9 men

Tell me what you think about this:

“Search” now allows you to “track” anyone on the web. Whenever we discover a new link, tag, or information, or if someone posts a new message to Charles Knight’s profile, we’ll send you an email so you can be the first to know. In order to track Charles Knight, input your contact information on the left. Once you have finished entering your information, click the “Track Them” button. We will send you an email with a confirmation link. “Track Me” is 100% anonymous. “Search” will never display or publicly disclose who you are tracking.

So this is what I learned: You can use alternative people search engines to find practically anyone, if you use more than one, and you can find out an awful lot about them if you really try - or pay. But never forget that others can likewise find you, and probably a lot about you, and even track your online movements without you knowing it! Comments?

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Guest Authors, Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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