3greeneggs

There’s been a lot of interest lately in search engines designed to help you find information about people. This is a service that Google hasn’t done a great job of providing. You can always throw someone’s name in the Google search box, but if there are multiple mentions of that person online, they’ll be all jumbled up. There’s a lot of interest in search engines that can automatically disambiguate this information and clearly present it.

There’s also a great deal of information in social networking sites that a Google search doesn’t take into account. Because a people search engine has a much more narrow domain, it can take advantage of this type of rich information.

I’m using myself and Hillary Clinton as test subjects (the only anecdotal data set ever to consist entirely of Hillaries?). Check them out for yourself:

• Spock - Spock aggregates data from sources like MySpace, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, and news sites. It does a decent job of distinguishing between multiple people with the same name, appearing to err more on the side of creating multiple entries per person. Spock is currently invite-only, so comment or e-mail if you’d like one.
• Wink - Wink is quite similar to Spock, but allows you to create your own profile. Wink found one less entry about me than Spock did, but Spock did a much better job of integrating all of the information on Hillary Clinton in one page.
• ZabaSearch - ZabaSearch scares me a bit. It found several of my former residential addresses, though it had my birthyear wrong in several places and didn’t find my immediate previous or current home address. I’m not sure how accurate the Hillary Clinton results were, but I do feel really bad for that other Hillary Clinton, born in 1980, from Iowa. The Clinton years were not a good time to have the name Hillary, and it might happen all over again!
• ZoomInfo - ZoomInfo is last, but it’s the most intriguing of all of sites I’ve evaluated. It’s the only one that parses the non-social web and make semantic inferences about the contents of various pages. For instance, ZoomInfo can recognize a text blurb about a person (or company), and pull out educational, work, or location info. ZoomInfo didn’t have anything about Hillary Clinton, which is a bit odd, but it offers this type of search for companies and jobs. Spock may have more money, but this is the one to watch!

Has anyone built a meta-people-search engine yet, so that we can get results from all of these with just one query?