Webware

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.

Social network Reunion.com has made a new friend: people search service Wink. The two have merged in a new deal that promises to make it dramatically easier to find people on the Web.

Early next year, the merger will produce "an entirely new brand," the companies said. The two have not said what its name will be, nor have financial details been disclosed. With the dual technologies of Reunion and Wink, the companies say that they will be able to search more than 700 million social-networking profiles. They'll be able to search profiles on MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster, AOL's Bebo, Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces, Yahoo, Xanga, and Twitter--among others.

Numbers from Nielsen last month indicated that Reunion.com, which says it receives 12 million unique visitors each month, is one of the fastest-growing social networks in the U.S. despite the fact that it's hardly on the radar of Twittering blog pundits. Its biggest demographic, according to Nielsen, is those between 55 and 64 who are looking to re-connect with friends and classmates.

"Through this merger, we're redefining the people search space by bridging existing social networks and providing consumers with the tools they need to find, be found, and stay connected," Wink CEO Michael Tanne said in a release. "We're aiming to create an entirely new online experience that simplifies people's lives by making it easy to find and keep up with everyone they know. There will be exciting developments in the coming months as we integrate our strengths and push our business forward."

123people, a service that collects information available on the Web about people from sources like Flickr, Google, and Facebook, announced that it has started operating in the United States. Previous to the announcement, 123people was only available in Europe as it was working the kinks out in its beta.

"After months of private beta, tweaking, and adding new features to improve the high-powered people search, 123people launches to the U.S. public," a company representative wrote in a blog post. "Now anyone can search for everyone they want to know."

123people, which competes with other people-finding services like Wink and Spock, features a relatively simple start page--a single search box that asks you to input a person's first and last name--but a results page that offers a slew of information that it gathers from sources across the Web.

The service gathers phone numbers, e-mail addresses, Google search results, pictures from Google images and Flickr, Facebook profiles, videos, news results, and even blogs to give the person searching a glimpse into all the information that can be collected about a particular person on the Internet. Along with the ability to find phone numbers, 123people includes a link next to each number allowing visitors to call the person using the online telephony service JaJah.

123people hopes to become a valuable resource for people trying to find individuals, but it suffers from a major drawback: finding people isn't so easy. The site will work extremely well for uncommon names, but searching for "John Smith" will yield too many results to make it useful unless the user knows who they're looking for. And chances are, if they already know the person, they probably won't find any reason to use the site.

Regardless, 123people has enjoyed some success in Europe and now that it's in the U.S., it hopes for similar results. The site is now open to all visitors and doesn't require registration.

People search engine Wink, the less bubbly but more filling competitor to Spock, is adding an interesting antilibel feature. Now, if you search for yourself on Wink and find a result you don't like, you can ask Wink to ignore it, and when other people search for you they won't see that result either.

You can delete feeds, results, and pictures from Wink search results.

It's a very useful feature--providing people are searching for you on Wink. While you can get that embarrassing party photo removed from the Wink results, it will still show up on Google. Wink CEO Michael Tanne makes two points regarding this. First, he says, about one third of the 3-billion-plus people searches done each month are now done on people search engines, with the other two-thirds split between general search engines and social networks. Wink is not a major force in people search yet, compared to online phone books, but it is making headway. Second, Wink results show up, to varying degrees, on general-purpose search engines. Tanne told me Wink results show up fairly reliably on Yahoo and that his team is working hard on Google optimization. So the upshot is, if you search for yourself on Wink and find a result or two you don't like, it's a good idea to "claim" your identity on the site and ask it to exclude those results. It can't hurt, and over time, it might help.

Wink also has some other new and interesting features. The most out there is a message board for people who haven't yet used the service. It works like this: Say you find an old friend via Wink, in a Web story or something, and you want to contact them. You can post a message to their name, and it will lie there waiting for them. If and when the person logs into Wink and claims their identity, they'll see your message. Tanne agrees this is a "last-resort" method for contacting people, but it's a clever idea and if Wink integrates with other social nets through OpenSocial, it could become a useful way to leave little message bombs around the Web for people you haven't communicated with in a while.

Finally, Wink now has a feature that lets you "friend" people and follow all their activies in a feed much like the Facebook "wall" and Plaxo's Pulse. By the way, Both Wink and Plaxo offer a widget that will you can use to tell people what you're doing online. Wink's only shows where you have accounts, though: Plaxo reports actual activity, such as Twitter updates.

Wink is working on an OpenSocial implementation, which could be very powerful. Conceptually, using Wink as an aggregation point for your social network activities makes a lot of sense. I'm curious to see what the crew comes up with.

My takeaway: Wink is worth using as a people search engine. It's also worth taking the time to claim your profile and edit out all the stuff about you that you don't like.

Attendi is a combination search engine and chat service.

Accepting the fact that Google and Yahoo have won the search engine battle, Attendi says it wants to be the search engine that "bypasses Internet content and head straight for your brain." The aim is to provide answers for questions individuals have that have yet to be indexed on the Web.

Example: Should you want to find a motorcycle that works well for someone who weighs 260 pounds, when you google that, you get a mishmash of irrelevant to mildly relevant answers. Searching on Attendi brings up a list of people who have volunteered to give information. Each person (or "Attendi") has a viewable profile. You can ask the system if you can chat with that person. If they are available online and respond, a chat window appears and you can ask them to share their expertise.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Spock, a new search engine that searches for people, has opened its doors to all as of this morning. I was actually able to use the service freely early yesterday, but things were a bit slow going--and still are. How does it stack up? Well, we got our hands on it a few months back while it was still in private beta and came away with a few concerns, mostly about the speed and its database of noncelebrities.

To my surprise, however, a quick search this morning picked up a good number of people in my family, many of whom have no real Internet presence. The service claims to have more than 100 million people in its database as of this morning. If you can't find yourself, you can register with the service and claim your name.

Charles Cooper over at CNET News.com has an interesting Q&A with Spock's CEO and cofounder Jaideep Singh. Some of the topics discussed include what content the service is indexing, the business plan, and some background on how the tool works.

Below is a widget of some Spock results. As you can see, feeding it "John Smith" is hardly a fair task, yielding everything from politicians to porn stars.To see it, click the read more link below.

The PeekYou people search engine launched today in open beta. It's yet another site (see Wink and Spock) designed to help you find people.

Surely we can do better than this.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

If you're interested in this space, my recommendation is to use Wink. Spock is still in closed beta, and PeekYou's current beta is unimpressive. Despite the company's claim of 50 million people in the database, there are many duplicates (over 700 entries for George Bush, each with a few links--and typing George W. Bush doesn't work to narrow the results). And there's no good way to tell who's who in a list of similar names. Which of the seven Stephen Hawkings returned is the physicist? None of them, as it turns out (the one link tagged with a U.K. location goes to a fake MySpace page).

In searching for my own name (vanity, thy name is Blogger), I found links to an out-of-date personal blog, MySpace, and Ryze (a social network I haven't used since 2002), but nothing current. No Webware, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

PeekYou claims similar features to Spock and Wink: Users can "claim" their own profile and even make themselves unlisted. But my advice is to not get sucked into this product. It's barely ready for public access, and certainly not worth the time if you've got an important search to do.

We're also checking out Gleamd, an aggregator on comments about people, which is still in private beta.

The people search engine Spock is still in very private beta, but the doors opened up a crack this morning when a few more people were let in to the system, including me. Now that I've been able to play with the service, it's easy to see that Spock's creators are trying to build more than just a Google of people. Spock is also being built to map the relationships of people to each other.

Spock wants password access to your online contact lists.

This is made clear when beta users activate their invitation code. Spock asks you first for your personal connections: It wants you to provide a password to one system you use that has a personal address book. The options are LinkedIn, Plaxo, Hotmail, Gmail, AOL, or Yahoo. Spock does a one-time slurp from the contact list you give it. It says it uses the information so it can add your contacts to Spock, which is pretty cool and will make Spock look better to you, but by providing password access to your accounts, you're helping Spock get data it couldn't otherwise get from the public Web. In particular, you're providing not just names and data to fill out the Spock database, but also the connections between people.

As I said in my preview of Spock, I think the company is really building the framework for a social network, not just a search engine. Or perhaps, when it comes to databases of people, there's no clear difference.

Spock will find itself

(Credit: CNET Networks)

I'm still looking forward to the full release of Spock, partly because the company is putting so much work into solving the very thorny problem of resolving its database so different people with the same name are handled the right way. Other people-search technologies (see Wink) just punt on this, and display separate records for each hit on a name they find (example).

Spock's current beta is pretty rough, and the database is far from complete, especially for noncelebrities. The dodge of getting new users to populate the database is very clever, and it should help. It does creep me out, though. Let me put it this way: If you happened to be in my Plaxo database, how would you feel about me sending all the details that I have on you over to Spock?

See also: TechCrunch on the likely fortunes for three competing people search engines.