Testing the People Search Engines
September 20th, 2007 (11:00am) Mike Gunderloy 28 Comments
Somehow, a bunch of companies seem to have decided that “searching for people” is one of the great unsolved problems of the Internet. I admit that I do end up searching for information on people now and then, but Google has generally done pretty well for me. Still, Spock, SquidWho, WhoZat?, and Wink are all pitching the notion that they can supply some secret sauce that Google is missing in the people search arena.
In a quest to see how these services stack up, I ran three names through them all: our fearless publisher Om Malik, my own somewhat-less-famous self, and Sean O’Steen, a web developer I know who also happens to have recently penned a piece on coworking for us. Results after the jump.
Not surprisingly, Google doesn’t have any trouble finding the most relevant results among the million-plus pages referring to Om Malik. GigaOm heads the list, followed by his Wikipedia page (I’m jealous), and Forbes and NewTeeVee content. Even if you didn’t have any clue as to Om’s interests, the first page of Google results would give you a good overview and help you track him down.
If you search for Om Malik over at Spock, you have to jump through a disambiguation page to choose between two listings. After that, you get a picture, as well as pictures of some people who are closely associated with him (Liz Gannes, Dave McClure, Niall Kennedy) and a bunch of tags (”blogger”, “internet personality”, “broadband”, and so on) - it’s as if Spock does the work of scanning and summarizing Google for you. There are also direct jumps to LinkedIn, Friendster, and various “About Om Malik” pages around the Web. So, there’s some added value here, though in their drive to summarize and tag everything, the details are harder to find then they are at Google.
SquidWho struck out on Om Malik. That is, there was no SquidWho page on him until I searched, at which point the site went through a rather slow process of building one. The result stitches together searches on Wikipedia, Amazon, Flickr, and other places to draw together a bunch of Om content from around the net, and offers to let me own and maintain the page so it will be better for the next visitor. No thanks, I was actually searching so I could learn.
WhoZat? highlights social network results: there’s space at the top where links to Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, Friendster, Flickr, and so on are prominent. Unfortunately it doesn’t try too hard to get the links right - searching for Om Malik produced 10 Facebook pages, none of which are him. There’s also a curious “12 related people were found. To improve your results, select the one you are looking for” which includes among its suggestions Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, and Red Herring. The list of links and tags is similarly huge and poorly ordered; WhoZat? appears to be operating on the principle that more is always better, but unfortunately in this case the result is a heap of variable quality results.
Wink was a pleasant surprise. The search for Om Malik came back quickly - even more quickly than the Google search - and led off with a picture and the first sentence of the Wikipedia bio. It also picked up on GigaOm, NewTeeVee, and Forbes. There’s no depth at all here, but for a quick selection of relevant links it did great.
Moving on, I tried plugging my own name into the same set of search engines. Google, as I already knew, picked up 368,000 results leading with three weblogs, and running into Web Worker Daily and various other spots I’ve written for as well as one of my books on the first page. So, it’s no great trick to get from there into decent depth on who I am by following links.
Spock strikes out on me entirely. This strikes me as curious, given the amount of drum-beating they’ve had, but there you are. No result at all.
SquidWho didn’t have a page on me either, but at least it went to the trouble of stroking my ego by building one. However, the result was less than impressive. I don’t have anything at Wikipedia or Flickr or YouTube, but that didn’t stop the SquidWho engine from including blank sections. It did find a nice selection of books at Amazon, but it chose to feature only out-of-print titles instead of ones that I’m actually still getting a royalty on. Bad SquidWho, no biscuit.
WhoZat? did somewhat better, finding a few dozen links about me to hook together into a page. But the ordering of the links appears to be pretty random, and the related people suggestions include “Redmond Product” which borders on being offensive.
On me, Wink was also very fast, and it pulled picture and recent info out of my Twitter page to lead off with. Below that, it picked up two of my personal sites as well as Web Worker Daily. However, Wink did miss the fact that I’m moving content to a new weblog these days.
Finally, my friend Sean O’Steen. Google turns up 26,400 pages on him, with the first page of results including weblog and Twitter pages, business site, LinkedIn, and his article here on WWD - enough to get a sense of what’s going on in his life, and to set a standard for the competing search engines.
Spock finds Sean O’Steen, hands him a handful of tags, and identifies him as a male from the San Francisco Bay region. Looks to me like they ran a summarizer over his LinkedIn profile.
SquidWho didn’t have a page on Sean O’Steen, and then it built a completely empty one. Wow, that’s sort of rough.
WhoZat? actually did pretty well on Sean O’Steen. Once again, the LinkedIn profile is there, and there are a bunch of links, but not an overwhelming number. Sean’s Jaiku page turns up here, even though I didn’t see it in any of the other engines.
Finally, Wink was right back quickly, anchored by the LinkedIn and Twitter profiles for Sean, with links to his most important pages including personal and business sites. There was a bit of noise here in finding a “sean osteen” as well - Wink being the only engine on the list that apparently ignored the apostrophe when matching.
The bottom line: Maybe searching for people is a great unsolved problem, but if it is, I don’t see a lot of solutions in this bunch. I find the tag-based summarizing in Spock to be too lossy to be useful, and in practice its coverage of people has been poor for me; if you’re not a joiner you appear to be outside of its lists. SquidWho seems to me to be a pretty badly failed experiment; the notion that people will “take over” and improve pages when they don’t already exist seems to me just plain wrong. WhoZat? may be useful on some searches, but for anyone who is even moderately famous on the net it tends to return far too much irrelevant material to be worth wading through; it’s also the slowest of the lot.
Wink was the exception in this group. It’s very quick at what it does, and very good at providing just a few, targeted results. With an easy-to-remember URL, it’s a good starting place. If you want to add just one people-searching site to your repertoire, on top of whatever general-purpose search engine you already use, Wink would be the one that I’d start with.
28 Comments Post your own comment
vincent404 says: September 20th, 2007 11:37am
Tried them with my name and got, as expected, blank results for the most part, though Wink did come up with results for a family member of mine. I guess I’m with you on the purpose of this and how it goes beyond Google.
Adam Ostrow says: September 20th, 2007 12:56pm
I did a similar review of a bunch of the people search sites a while back and came to a similar conclusion. How exactly entrepreneurs and VCs came to the conclusion that people search is a big huge problem escapes me, but with all the hype surrounding services like Spock, maybe I’m the one that’s missing something. Who knows. Either way there is no way I’d go out of my way to use them versus Google in my day-to-day activities at the moment.
Sean O'Steen says: September 20th, 2007 1:30pm
I guess fair is fair. I didn’t know who SquidWho was either until I read your article. Thanks Mike!
Elke Sisco says: September 20th, 2007 3:25pm
Your test seems rather limited. What if your name wasn’t “Om Malik”, “Sean O’Steen” or “Mike Gunderloy” but “Jenny Smith” or “Michael Jackson”? Common names and the ability to find one particular Michael Jackson along a thousand - that, in my opinion, is where the meat is going to be for people search.
Kimberly Dawn Wells says: September 21st, 2007 7:18am
Thanks for mentioning Squidoo and SquidWho! The best way to make it better is to pop over and start creating your own lenses. It’s a great way to organize what gets found about you online, before someone else makes it up themselves.
~Kimberly
Squidoo’s Community Organizer
The People Search Engine Smackdown « GigaOM says: September 21st, 2007 7:47am
[...] by Om Malik Friday, September 21, 2007 at 7:44 AM PT | No comments WebWorkerDaily is putting People Search Engines - Spock, SquidWho, WhoZat and Wink through the grinder. They are [...]
Rob Tao says: September 21st, 2007 8:51am
what about WhitePages.com? best people search I’ve found. Use it all the time, and I think they’re adding all those Wink features, so I think I’ll stick w/ them. — rob.
Mark Dueceil says: September 21st, 2007 8:59am
You forgot Pipl, compare it with the above and you’ll be surprised.
Jordan Mitchell says: September 21st, 2007 9:29am
Ok, so yeah, maybe there can be an improvement to how we all search for ourselves, our friends, and celebrities — that incidently is primarily what people do in these people search engines.
I think the bigger market opportunity is making the people of the Web more transparent to each other, in the context of our Web browsing and searching. What if you married the contextual/behavioral technologies in advertising today with social media and search? You’d have access to relevant people and “congregations” (not aggregations) as you browse, and the ability to search the Web’s content through those congregational lenses.
Gary Hawkins says: September 21st, 2007 10:03am
I like WhitePages.com too.
dreadsword says: September 21st, 2007 10:10am
I really don’t get these things. They’re at best social network crawlers, not real “people searches.” I have a complete bio on my blog:
http://rwurl.com/rod
…that not one of these “people search engines” has managed to successfully index, despite it clearly being biographical content. So all these really are are social network search aggregators or invasive, semi-automated wikis - no new “semantic technology” or anything of note that I can see.
Rob Tao says: September 21st, 2007 12:09pm
This is a direct link to R Edwards in Winnipeg, CA on WhitePages.com (the Canadian version).
Don’t know if it’s you, but it sure looks like you, Rod Edwards ;-)
dreadsword says: September 21st, 2007 2:16pm
That illustrates my point nicely, Rob. The old school phone directories suck (neither of those is actually me). The new school “2.0″ directories suck in a different way.
Marzia Polito says: September 21st, 2007 2:21pm
Hi Mike, thanks for blogging about us and for your comments ! Next time please mention that, unlike the other engines you compared us with, Whozat? is still in Private Beta, hence largely testing and experimenting; we are working on speed, and on a better ‘cleanup’ of results. We are not targeting the market of ‘famous’ people –generic search engine already do the job on those-, and even if we plan on covering them well, we are very happy you got good results on us on the ‘less famous’ names you tried ! Our semantic engine, the first one of its kind, might sometimes output too much for now, and we will work on a better selection of keywords, expressions, and related names, but we’ve had users tell us they can often use them to narrow things down a lot or find something that would otherwise have been buried. And don’t forget our visual component, our machine-vision selected pictures help users wade through to find the person they look for. Did you try our feedback system ? Probably you would have gotten much better results with just one or two thumbs-up/thumbs-down clicks: the results get immediately re-ranked according to what is semantically most similar/most dissimilar to the element you chose to give feedback on.
All in all, in Private Beta, we’d rather offer imperfect innovation than perfect old stuff. I think you may want to give a second look at some of the unique features you did not get to explore. It’s still very early days for Whozat? and we have lots in store for you ahead, but after all, there is a reason why the only quantitative comparison of Google, Yahoo, Ask, Spock, Wink, Pipl and Whozat?, a blind comparison of the relevance of search results for a third-party-generated list of non-famous names, yielded Whozat? as the clear winner: http://whozat.com/comparison.bmp .
Marzia Polito, Whozat? Co-founder
What does “here, have my card” really mean? « The GlocalReach Blog says: September 22nd, 2007 2:01am
[...] third reason is noise. You can’t find someone to talk to even if you did have a valid reason to [...]
Marc’s Voice » Blog Archive » Heading to London - luvs says: September 23rd, 2007 1:53am
[...] People Search Engines [...]
» Pandia Weekend Wrap-up (Week 37-38/2007) says: September 23rd, 2007 8:35am
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tylerwillis says: September 24th, 2007 12:53am
People search for me fits into two categories: 1) finding information on one specific person and 2) finding a group of people defined by certain (broad or narrow) characteristics I supply.
The reason I’m skeptical about the future of all these people search engines out now is they ignore the 800 pound competitor. Wink’s competition was Google, but now it’s Facebook.
As Facebook becomes an “internet home” to most people (which isn’t clear yet, but I contend that average Americans are beginning to use Facebook to aggregate and display an online persona), it makes sense to search for a user’s definition of themselves when you want to learn about them. People search doesn’t need to aggregate objective material for 9 out of 10 occasions, when I’m meeting a friend of a friend I’d much prefer reading a self written personal/professional definition.
As apps begin to allow you to identify cross sections of the population by interesting facts (whose read x, who lives in my neighborhood, etc.), you can apply theory and testing to identify the best searches to find people you want to be aware of.
Testing the People Search Engines at Maszman Speaks! says: September 24th, 2007 8:00am
[...] comrades at Web Worker Daily go about Testing the People Search Engines. I can honestly say I can’t recall hearing of the winner, Wink, but here’s a Wink [...]
People Search Engines and the tail « ScottRu says: September 24th, 2007 8:10am
[...] Search Engines and the tail Web Worker Daily has a review of some People Search Engines, where (as usual) “People Search Engines” consist of the new hotness only - engines [...]
Charles Knight says: September 24th, 2007 6:57pm
In my article on PeopleFinders, I demonstrated how their free sex offender search identified a registered offender in my neighborhood near a little league field. It provided a map, a picture of the offender, and the charge: carnal knowledge of a 13-15 year old. Pretty useful stuff.
We have also looked into PeekYou (a sponsor), yoName, ZabaSearch, ex.plore.us, pipl and others mentioned. Recently Wink and yoName participated in a debate so that readers could hear directly from the search engines.
We also coordinated a People Search panel to take place in November at the Defrag conference in Denver.
As WhoZat? pointed out, there is still plenty of growing to do. How long have Spock and PeekYou been out?
In a very short while I believe that when you want to find a job you’ll go to a Job Search engine, and when you want to find a person, you will go, expectantly, to a good People Search engine.
Lizi says: October 1st, 2007 12:33am
People search is an area being pursued by a variety of startups which are recently getting a lot of attention – each one of the existing People search solutions is a variation of white pages. After you enter name or email you get search results containing a list of profiles from various social networks. These solutions are great to find information about specific person or locate your friends.
We , at Copenda have a totally different approach to people search - we call it social people search. Copenda is a place to meet new people , you enter general preferences (age,location,gender etc..) and you get a list of profiles from various social networks and leading dating sites.
http://www.copenda.com
google » Testing the People Search Engines says: October 8th, 2007 10:43am
[...] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerpt [...]
Andy Wong says: October 15th, 2007 11:24pm
These engines have one flavor in common:
Focusing on important hubs of people information like blogs, wikipedia, photo sites and, of course, social networks like facebook.
Why?
Because many of my friends have blogs? or many of my contacts live in social networks? or they are prominent enough to have an entry in Wikipedia?
But I do have many contacts having web presence through their personal web pages, press releases, or online news etc. Why shouldn’t a people search engine provide cross references about a person with wide range of web pages, rather than pages of hubs of people information?
I just wrote a bit more at
http://webandlife.blogspot.com/2007/10/people-search-engines-for-who-and-what.html
WWD Coffee Break - Project Management, Travel Tips & Themes « Web Worker Daily says: November 9th, 2007 8:00am
[...] With More Networking - Wink, which came out on top of our recent roundup of people search engines, has released version 2 of their site. Now you can claim and edit your own profile on Wink, build [...]
» WWD Coffee Break - Project Management, Travel Tips & Themes - Your Gadget Pro says: November 12th, 2007 2:53am
[...] With More Networking - Wink, which came out on top of our recent roundup of people search engines, has released version 2 of their site. Now you can claim and edit your own profile on Wink, build [...]
jose says: December 26th, 2007 5:38am
Hello, i think best people search and background check website is http://www.peoplefind.net
Social Search Engines Wink, Reunion to Merge - GigaOM says: November 3rd, 2008 5:00am
[...] Gaffikin, Monday, November 3, 2008 at 5:00 AM PT Comments (0) Wink, a Mountain View, Calif., people search site is merging with Reunion, a Santa Monica, Calif., [...]