showdown in people search
Posted on | January 29, 2008 | 14 Comments
people search sure is a controversial topic…while some might find a search engine capable of automatically syndicating all available information on a person creepy, to say the least, others welcome the concept, arguing, that all this information has been online & and for the most part indexed anyway. I belong to the latter, so on the occasion of 123 people’s recent public launch, I took the chance and compared it to Spock, another people search service around since mid-2007. subject of matter – the good old vanity search…
Spock
Spock’s approach to people search is primarily based on user-generated content. to be included in Spock’s directory, a personal profile can be created either by the person himself, or through invitation by an existing Spock-member automatically by Spock (see comments below!). core personal info like email-addresses, IM-handles and phone-numbers can only be added by the owner of the profile and are not automatically crawled. photos, websites, tags & related people can be added & voted for relevancy by the whole community (the profile-owner, however, can not remove data added by others). user engagement and inter-personal trust is measured in “Spock Power”.
Spock’s approach generates highly relevant results (no surprise, as most persons seed their profiles themselves) while obtaining a layer of privacy. However, its less inclusive strategy for adding persons to the index also means you won’t find less-connected people here.
Vanity search: Spock lists my most relevant website/blogs on top. while it automatically added the link to an outdated Myspace-profile, I had to add Facebook manually. There are two photos (one added by me, one crawled from Myspace probably) and a bunch of relevant tags. Spock crawled 5 of my email-addresses, but keeps them hidden until I decide different.
coming from Austria, 123people is an i5invest-backed product publicly launched last friday. after initial hype tearing down their servers, 123people now seems back to stable operation.
while Spock could be described as a wiki for personal data, 123people is a more traditional meta-crawler. users are still invited to create their own profiles, but the search results clearly emphasize on automatically indexed information. sources include the usual suspects (Google, Yahoo, Flickr) but also local services like the Austrian Yellow Pages. each search result clearly indicates its source, including a deep link for further investigation. besides organic search results, 123people also creates profiles based on the crawled data. quite confusing, as there are currently already three profiles on my name – one created by myself when registering for 123people, and the other two automatically generated from Myspace-profiles. there seems to be no way to consolidate these distinct profiles within each other and with organic results. 123people seems to ignore privacy issues, as there is no way to suppress certain info to show up on organic search.
Vanity search: 123people got only 2 of my email-addresses, but to make things up it crawled my cellphone-number. 123people also displays email & phone-number of another guy sharing my name, there seems to be no obvious way to keep this separated from my persona.
the image-results were highly irrelevant, out of 30 images, only two actually show me. reason for this is the poor quality of the underlying image-searches at Google and Yahoo (Yahoo f.e. shows every single image I’ve ever posted on my blog, which makes no sense at all). bonus: 123people found the only video featuring myself (an interview done for ORF treffpunkt.kultur). 123people finds a lot of weblinks related to my person, but does a bad job at ordering by relevancy. while I’m pretty sure 123people crawls Xing & Facebook, it didn’t connect my profiles on these platforms.
conclusions
both services differ quite strongly in their approaches. while Spock delivers highly relevant results with built-in privacy control (which deserves some applause), the pool of search-subjects is conceptually more restricted. 123people’s organic method has some work to do in terms of relevancy & consolidation. both tools won’t make me switch my primary tool for people search though, which, of course, still is Google.
ps: I’ld love to hear your opinion on people search, comment below!
Comments
14 Responses to “showdown in people search”
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January 29th, 2008 @ 1:01 pm
excellent post!
opt-in and privacy control are the most relevant keywords for people search services I guess. anything else IS creepy.
January 29th, 2008 @ 1:13 pm
thx christian, agree on first part of your statement. second part would imply that google is ‘creepy’ as well, don’t you think?
January 29th, 2008 @ 1:31 pm
well, google search is focused on “relevant content” rather than on personal data. I usually don’t get email-address, phone number and post address on google search, but maybe an article this person has written. that still makes a difference. it’s more about finding out what a person does, and not stalking somebody.
of course there is no black and white in that game. google’s datacenter are somewhat creepy too.
January 29th, 2008 @ 2:10 pm
good argument, and quite good distinction between “search” and “people search”. on the other hand, google for “firstname+surname+phone” or “+email” and the stalking can begin…(ok, that’s true at least for some queries).
I guess, in syndicating the information, people search just improves the economies of stalking
January 29th, 2008 @ 10:20 pm
Hi Michael,
This is Maia, from Spock. I just wanted to thank you for your feedback and remarks.
To clear up some things, most of the 250 million + search results on Spock are actually automatically indexed from the public web and not created by Spock users. Only a small percentage of the information you see on Spock is created by users.
Also, Christian – I’m not sure if your comment was about Spock, but I wanted to let you know that we try to NEVER display personal information like email addresses, phone numbers, and post addresses – even if we find that information on the public web. This is in contrast to Google, which will display and index any information it finds.
We believe strongly in useful privacy controls. I’m glad you like them – do you have any suggestions on how to approve them? Please let me know if you think of anything; either here, or feel free to email me personally.
Thanks,
Maia
January 30th, 2008 @ 12:42 am
thx for your answer & clarification, Maia!
to be honest, I wasn’t too sure about this in the first place…I’ve updated the post accordingly. however, I guess it’s right to assume that there is some kind of “seeding” involved, when a person is added to Spock’s index, right? My guess is, that this is done by “following the social graph” of people (in my particular case, one of my Myspace-contacts also shows up on Spock – I just asked this person, and he definitely didn’t signup for Spock – so my guess is, Spock was following my Myspace friends-list to seed his profile).
of course it’s more likely that I’m wrong here
January 30th, 2008 @ 7:26 am
maia,
my comment was more about 123people, which does proudly display phone, email and post addresses.
January 30th, 2008 @ 3:51 pm
indeed a quite good post michael! thanks.
i work for 123PEOPLE. we are currently restoring the database why we recently had some troubles with the search results, however, we weren’t prepared for the intense initial popularty the site gained in the first days after the launch.
the search results are improving constantly and for right now are working on several improvements and new crawling databases.
regards to our “friendly competitors” SPOCK.
lukas
January 30th, 2008 @ 3:55 pm
@ Maia
Dear Maia,
concerning the your Statement regarding the Privacy Controls I must say that this is also a crucial topic for 123PEOPLE. We believe that in nowadays world data storage and privacy are more and more important. This is why you can fully adjust and set your privacy levels at 123PEOPLE. The idea is that you, for yourself, should decide which Information should be viewable by the Public and which not.
I am sure all of us (spock, yasni, etc.) are aware that Privacy should not be tabood, but activelly controlled.
lukas | 123people
January 30th, 2008 @ 4:15 pm
lukas,
could you please set my privacy level that my phone number is not showing up on your site?
thanks!
January 30th, 2008 @ 4:18 pm
christian has a point here… the problem is, that 123people’s privacy settings only seem to affect data a user has entered into his profile himself, but not the auto-crawled data (like the phone numbers).
January 30th, 2008 @ 4:20 pm
hi christian,
Simply Sign up at 123people.com and then go to “Meine Einstellungen” and Set your Privacy Level to “medium” or “low”. Thereafter your Phone Number and Email Adress won’t be shown.
In case you have any questions or you are somehow concerned about the Fact that you have to register in order to change that you can drop me a line via email or post it here…
adios
lukas
January 30th, 2008 @ 4:51 pm
Christian & Michael,
The 123people Site is bilaterally organized. You have to differentiate between the “Profile” Section and the “Found on the Web” Section. With your privacy Settings you can Control your very own “Profile”.
Obviously we cannot influence the “Found on the web” section. This is unfortunately not (yet) possible. The results shown in this Section are made up by Information actually found on the Web. This is not implicitly associated with yourself. Meaning that this simply Crawls the Web after what you put into the Search Field. There is no Distinction made (it’s not really possible) between you and People having the same Name for example…
lukas
January 30th, 2008 @ 4:55 pm
some call this blackmailing. what if I don’t want to sign up on every service that comes up with a business plan based on my phone number?
as already mentioned in the post: opt-in is the secret, not opt-out.
but yes, let’s discuss it on another occasion.