Ken Norton makes a very interesting observation about "people search":
Somehow, subconsciously, LinkedIn has become my people search engine of choice. Interesting.
Interesting indeed.
I, too, have used LinkedIn to find people a few times. When it works, it works pretty well. But in my limited experience, it only solves half the problem. LinkedIn works well for finding someone when you already know their name. But if you're looking for someone in your network of connections who can help with a woodworking project or has a special skill, it's a different story.
I think there's a big opportunity there.
It's also amusing that the old Yahoo! People Search seems to do neither of those terribly well. It's more of a "white pages for the Internet" that's useful in a stalking sort of way. ;-)
Posted by jzawodn at February 07, 2006 07:56 PM
Perhaps http://www.linkme.com.au/ works a little better than LinkedIn. It's the same concept as linkedin but seems to get less of a showing.
Keep an eye on http://collectivex.com --it's in private beta now. One of the main goals of the project is to help folks accomplish objectives by finding other people with the ability and/or connections to help out. Disclaimer: I worked on this one with founder Clarence Wooten in its infancy.
Why doesn't Yahoo just acquire LinkedIn and integrate it across People Search, Hot Jobs, and MyWeb profiles.
LinkedIn works pretty well for me, and i actually have used it to find people i don't know when we were looking for folks in tech PR and biz dev. i've also surfed around on various company and other links at times. (full disclosure: my company SimplyHired.com has a partnership with LinkedIn, and i know Reid & several of the folks over at LinkedIn from my old days at PayPal).
as an alternative, another engine that turns up some interesting stuff is ZoomInfo. they're a little different in that LinkedIn info is based on pro-active involvement by someone to join LinkedIn and enter their info, whereas ZoomInfo crawls the web to find info on people and then aggregate it. possibly some issues there with consent / accuracy, altho they do enable you to "claim" info and make edits/corrections. (note: in my case there were 2 people with my exact same name & middle initial... the other guy is also well-referenced online, so i'm still trying to separate which stuff is about me & which is about him)
i've tried using other social networking services to surf people, but they don't seem to work as well as LinkedIn... at least for the professional stuff.
Yahoo People is just gateway to intelius.com and you use their underlaying technology.
The same thing is with Yahoo autos and autotrader.com.
Yahoo is parasite who blackmails other businesses and taking its share. I saw summer before last summer how Yahoo decided to take share from autotrader.com instead of launching own cars search engine because Yahoo do not want to develop business in cars industry, it is easier to take somebody's money for being Yahoo.
One day you are going to regret because of not developing own business.
For people search, you should check out ZoomInfo. Here's your profile.
Whoops... Here it is: http://www.zoominfo.com/Search/PersonDetail.aspx?PersonID=27364477
Linkedin strikes me as being a little too much like Classmates.com I'm generally not a big fan of having to pay for information on the Web. Or paying for anything, as far as that goes. :)
I was researching blogs online and I noticed that you have a link to Intelius on your site. PeopleFinders.com (www.peoplefinders.com) has more data and uses the latest people search technology. Any chance you could give us equal time with a link on your site?
I want also to share a website which also offers people search and instant people search. Try https://www.identitypi.com/people-search.php
