Last week I began reviewing Austria-based 123People.com, a new search engine trying to make some headway in the vertical niche of people search. People search engines are useful to everyone from employers to stalkers, but does 123People have what it takes to be useful? In this second and final part, we'll dive right in with a bunch of searches and see what we get for results.
Profiles
I had to search for myself, of course. Below I'm showing you just one section of the results, because I couldn't fit it all into one screen shot; you'd have to scroll down to see everything. Basically, 123People sets up the results page in sections, with each section devoted to a particular type of information. Let me show you what I mean:
As you can see (if you look closely; I had to shrink and crop to fit), you can request email updates for this particular search. Just below that you get a summary of what was found: 31 web links, 37 images, 14 videos, 47 social network profiles, 32 emails, 16 phone numbers, 19 blogs, 20 documents, 6 Amazon references, 6 instant messages, but no news items. While none of the email addresses or phone numbers are mine, the fourth and fifth web links go to SEO Chat articles I have written.
Before I go into any detail as to what 123People knows about me, I'd like to point out a few interesting aspects of these modular results. In the lower left corner of each box, you can click on arrows to page through the results, and you always know where you are thanks to the numbering system. Near the top of each box on the right are tabs; you can click on these tabs if you want to see results only from a particular source. Icons next to each result also tell you where it came from. The icons next to the phone numbers let you call the person by using Jalal, a program with which I am not familiar.
In all, about 13 or 14 different sections covering different types of information, all publicly available on the Internet, are crammed into this one results page. I've seen more crowded web pages, but not very often. On the other hand, the page didn't feel too crowded to me. Suzanne Koch, reviewing 123People for Pandia Search Engine News, however, noted that "all this information makes the search results page feel crammed and it can be overwhelming to navigate." She wished she had the option of closing the sections she didn't need.
Search Engine News 
