Can 123People Find You? - Finding Other People
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I know far too many Smiths, and trying to hunt them down with 123People is futile. I thought I found an old Amazon shipping address for one of them, but it was on a wish list of books that he clearly never would have wanted. I also have the disadvantage of having friends who possess names made more famous by others (it's not just me).
But my investigations weren't entirely hopeless or fruitless. In searching for one friend of mine, I was pleasantly surprised to see that several images of her came up on the first page. Clicking on an image enlarges it tremendously, neatly overlaying the rest of your data. For example:
And of course you can click the X in the upper right corner to return it to its former thumbnail size. Hovering over the blue "source" on the lower left reveals the image's URL; you can click "source" to be taken to a full-sized version of the image on a different page, but you will not get the content surrounding the image. In other words, you will only get the image out of its context.
For this particular search, my friend was all over the results. I didn't find her current phone number, home address, or even email address, but in addition to the images she showed up in the web links, documents, blogs, biography entries (not bios of her, but ones by her), and more. I discovered she'd received an award three years ago that she never told me about (and boy is she going to hear about that from me!). I could quickly identify the words in the tag cloud that were related to her, including her hobbies, her husband's first and last names, and her penchant for stress.
About the tag cloud again: it's worth mentioning that if you click on a word in the tag cloud, the entire cloud will either disappear or change. My friend's cloud disappeared when I clicked on certain words, but when I clicked on "SEO" on the tag cloud under my own results, it simply changed. New tags turned up, and old ones went away, but a number of them were still relevant - most notably, the "Searchles" tag appeared. I reviewed the Searchles search engine twice and have a (much neglected of late) profile there; I've contributed somewhere between a hundred and two hundred links to the social bookmarking site.
So, what is my final opinion? 123People is a potentially useful first effort, but it seems as if it would be uneven if you are looking for someone you don't know well. It still needs work, but it's worth watching to see what develops.
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