People Search on the Web

Gary Eckstein Social Media 8 , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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A common problem experienced with the usual search engines such as google, live and yahoo is that, when searching for specific people, too many results are returned. This is where a niche in the search market has emerged; people search.

There are various people search sites out there with differing takes on a common theme (which is basically searching for information on specific people). The great thing common to most people search sites is that they build relationships and don’t just show endless non-ordered lists of sites containing the search term (as live etc. do). People search engines also specialise in relating information from social networking sites such as facebook, myspace and LinkedIn as well as searching the Deep Web. In essence the people search engines look for relationships between the data and then order the information in a logical ‘people search friendly’ order.

Below are a few of the more common people search sites:

pipl

Pipl returns results in categories such as ‘personal profiles’, ‘email address’, ‘publications’, ‘web pages’ and so on. The results appear more thorough than the other people search engines and pipl seems good at returning international results. We love that pipl returns photos of the person/people on whcih the search is based.

ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo is slightly different to the other people search engines listed in this article in that it relates people to companies/organizations. This is certain to be of benefit to some searchers however with people belonging to more than one organization or even freelancing or contracting this may cause search ineffectiveness using Zoominfo. ZoomInfo is very poor for non American results.

Wink

Wink returns results very quickly and orders by name with a photo of the person attached. The search results are simple to read and sort through and wink is good at returing international results.

PeekYou

PeekYou is excellent if you are looking for a summary of results. Displaying all information for a people search is slow however the results are presented in a very readable, friendly and concise manner.  Great for American searches but poor for international people searches.

Spock

Results from Spock are returned very quickly however the results are good for the U.S.A. but are weak for international searches. Results are returned in summary format which is nice however the screen is cluttered with sponsored links (advertising).

Our favorite:

For the pure reason that pipl and Wink return decent International person results they get the vote for the two best!