No More Deperately Seeking Susan - People Search Made Easy
In a move that is bound to raise the hackles of the privacy advocates, a breed of search engines are scouring through social networking sites such as LinkedIn, MySpace, etc. in their effort to index the world population.
Wink.com and Zoominfo.com already have 215 million and 36 million profiles, respectively, while Spock.com claims to have indexed 100 million and growing. Most sites allow you to create a personalised profile, an some offer authority rankings as well.
I myself have Googled people a number of time which throws up results based on everything under the sun - these on the other hand, differentiate themselves by offering targeted results for profiles of people - a people search engine.
As this article states, Spock allows users to search for tags–such as “saxophonist” 
or “venture capitalist”–and then view a list of people associated with those tags. Spock uses a combination of human and machine intelligence to automatically come up with the tags: search algorithms identify possible tags, and users can vote on their relevance or add new tags.
Registered users can add private tags to another person’s profile to organize their contacts based on information that they don’t want to share, and thus use it as their own private contact database.
The social-network component of the website introduces an element of crowd commentary into the search process. George W. Bush is tagged “miserable failure,” with a vote of 87 to 31 in favor of the tag’s relevance as of this writing. Users aren’t allowed to vote anonymously, and the tag links to the profiles of people who voted. This however could very well backfire by users creating multiple accounts to malign another person.
Wink on the other hand, is able to search by variables such as location with more focus than the simple word recognition Google uses, hence Wink would recognize that Framingham is close to Boston, and it would include both when a user enters”Boston” as a search term.
Apart from the megalomanic thrill of watching results of yourself coming up these, probably one of the biggest uses for this would be in recruiting - apart from getting more information about the person, it would also allow a company to search for people with a similar designation in a particular area.
Filed under: Digital culture, Ideas & Innovations, Trends