More people-searching coming to U.S. thanks to Yasni
Yasni, a people search site that was originally only available to European visitors, announced Thursday that it's launched a U.S. version of the site. The move is in step with competitor, 123people, which recently brought its service to the U.S.
According to the Yasni, the U.S. version of its site will allow visitors to search for people across the globe, provided information exists on the Web, and will scrape links, images, social networking profiles, blogs, news results, and videos to find the desired person. Yasni believes that information is what users covet most.
"We run an extensive global people search resource, and have gathered a lot of public data about what people look for and how they act on that information," Yasni founder and CEO, Steffen Ruehl said in a statement.
In an attempt to be more than a search site, Yasni also features a VIP Rank, which ranks each registered user based on the amount of search data available on them. And for those who search for a person and Yasni fails to deliver any results, the company has added a "missing person" ad tool to enlist the help of others to find those people who couldn't be located through the service.
Whether or not Yasni can be a success in the U.S. remains in doubt. The site doesn't deliver the sheer number of results that can be found through 123people, but suffers from the same issues as its competitor: searching for someone with a common name like "John Smith" makes the site practically useless. And when examining the viability of a people search site, it's impossible to lose sight of privacy concerns and the company's ability to attract advertisers.
Yasni's U.S. site is now live. Registration is not required to search, but creating an account is required for users who want access to the additional features.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
As for searching for common names such as John Smith, it's true that this can be challenging, yet it's still more effective than the alternatives e.g., a Google search for John Smith; or searching through more than hundred of other individual sites. To facilitate such searches, yasni provides its users with an intelligent tag cloud and/or a "related people" cloud for refining their search. In most cases, someone searching for a "John Smith" would have at least one additional piece of information. Users can extract this information into the search to return more specific results.
yasni crawls more sources on the web than any other people search engine, which enables yasni to deliver the most results. If the information exists online about any person, yasni is able to retrieve it either via an immediate response or by email.