Posted: 23 May 2009 13:01 PM IST.
123people.com is a wonderful People search engine which is built upon the Yahoo Boss platform. It has recently launched many local sites in Europe which makes it the first multinational people search tool. It is now available in seven countries including; France, UK, US, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and Austria, in six languages.
What does 123people.com do?
123people is a real time people search engine that looks into nearly every corner of the Web. You can find comprehensive and centralized people related information consisting of their social networking profiles, images, videos, phone numbers, emails, blog posting and documents and much more.
They currently gets over 16 million unique visitors per month. Designed to fundamentally improve the quality of people search on the web, the site retrieves people information from globally accessible databases and social networks on the web and also searches country-specific websites, local business services and news sources to provide fast and comprehensive results.
What is most amazing to me is the fact that the guys behind 123people.com are able to run such a popular & powerful engine by using Yahoo Search Boss. However, the big question is, If an external company can come and use Yahoo’s Search index to make something really cool, why can’t yahoo just update their own people search engine and maybe make it a little more effective?
But anyway, the only problem that 123people.com probably has is their scalability issues - because i noticed that their site is often down (because of too much traffic maybe??), who knows!
You might ask, why do we need a people search engine when we have the all-in-all of search engine like the big G! Well the best part about having a niche search engine only for finding people is that you don’t end up getting millions of results for that person name which are irrelevant and probably not even accurate. A niche engines like 123people is intelligent enough to understand where to look for people, for instance today if I want to look up specific information about someone , I usually do the following:
1. I do a search at Facebook with the person’s First, Last Name and email address.
2. I do a Twitter advanced search to see if that person has an account.
3. If I have seen the person before, I do a Google Image Search to see if I can spot him in the first page.
4. and lastly I’d do a search of his email Id, directly in Google.
Now all these gives me more than enough information to find the person that I’m looking for, however searching these different engines takes up time and if there is one engine which can do all these, I’m all in for it and you should be too!
Now, 123people is not the only search engine that is covering this particular niche. There are lots of other players that do a pretty decent job in people search as well. I personally like one of them and I think it really deserves a mention.
Pipl - Pipl is a very comprehensive people search on the web. Pipl query-engine finds very high-quality results and displays them on a single page. They look at online personal profiles, phone listings, court records and scientific publications.
Update: Apparently, Yasni.com is another cool people search engine that I didn’t know about. It also lists all the information about a person from different social networks and search engines on one single page.
So the next time you are searching for a person online, you know where to look!
