People Search: Who is the Owner of YOU?

Sapna Satagopan | June 15, 2007, 04:43 PM

Spock.com, the latest entrant in the very nascent 'people search' business briefed us this week. A couple of other recent players seem to be pipl.com, wink.com and zoominfo [which has been around for much longer]. Barry Parr pointed me to the phone-bookish Yahoo People Search. People Search sites’ argument about the lack of clarity in general search results is valid, as is among most vertical search sites.

Spidering and parsing content seems to be lesser of a problem among the people search sites, but finding unique and valuable spins to the content is. Zoominfo’s take on people search is more for professionals, expanding into company search and job search. Spock’s take is focused on the ‘community’, allowing the members to tag results based on relevancy and additional factors. I am not quite sure I would want my profile to be tagged by a community. And as a people search user, I would probably be worried first about what content exists about me, as the Spock team noted in the initial usage of their service.

People Search can cater to more than the directory-information seekers. Research, networking opportunities exist—as proven by LinkedIn, for example. Should I visit different sites depending on my motivation to search on people? Perhaps not. [Zoominfo does provide better results for my co-workers than Steve Jobs]. I think two things are certainly clear, however.
1) People Search is fragmented, even in its initial stages. And vendors are experimenting a lot, with multimedia, social networking and tagging.
2) There is a lot more of me that is findable than ever before. [Pipl.com also pulls out my Amazon customer profile]. Whether that’s a good thing or not, I am probably going to be extra careful about profiles created in any case.