Time on People Search

Check out Time Magazine on people search today. They use the phrase, 'ways to snoop online.' In some cases, it can feel that way. For example with pipl, I discovered private information about the average Joe and Betty that I'm sure they don't know is out there -- and more information than you'd comfortably want to know -- unless there was an ill intent or more.

To lump all of them together in one basket didn't seem accurate or fair but it does raise general online privacy concerns which is valid. Client Spock merely indexes information that is already publicly out there about a person, data they have chosen to add, a far cry from a search engine that brings back your age, address, records on a family will or piece of property you own, potential criminal record, phone number and email.

In other words, if you have openly published your phone number or email on MySpace, flickr, your corporate website or a social network, Spock simply aggregates all of that information in one central location.

YOU, the user choose whether you want to share personal information within Spock through your settings, i.e., I can only see, friends can only see, everyone can see. There is also a private section where you can store useful data on people you mark as a 'favorite,' such as birthdays, children's names or email addresses.

The people search engines listed have different goals and meet different needs. Spock aims to index everyone - average people, famous people and even deceased, i.e., Mozart or your grandfather if you choose to add information about him, a cool and easy way to have your heritage recorded on the web. ZoomInfo has another goal and purpose. Like LinkedIn, it is largely focused on business profiles using natural language processing.

The article points out that there are inaccuracies in some of the search results, but ya know, these search engines are fairly new and accuracy and the amount of data will only improve over time. Look at Google and Wikipedia, both of which present examples of inaccurate or useless search results, yet they remain incredibly productive online tools.

So too will the new vertical market search tools. Online robots will get better and better as the technology improves and more data is available. Additionally, the community -- in more cases than not -- will add value to the data that is out there.

Update: Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch also responds to the Time piece.