123People joined the legion of vertical search engines that specialize in finding people online. If you've ever tried to track down old classmates or get a handle on a potential employee's background, you know how much information Google returns; do we really need something this specialized? Yes we do; keep reading to find out why, and whether 123People delivers.
I'm not exactly the best example for this; as of this writing, the first result returned for my name in Google is my bio on SEO Chat, which links to all of my articles. So let's use our CTO: Richard Smith. The man is musical, but he's not the “Finger Picking Virtuoso” returned by Google as the first result under his name; nor is he a football player, a former editor of the British Medical Journal, a rabid Boston-based privacy activist...you get the idea. Even adding “computer programmer” to his name doesn't help; I get the activist instead.
This is the kind of problem for which people search engines came about in the first place. If you can't find someone, or you can't tell when you've found the right person, via a general search engine, perhaps a focused one will deliver what you're missing. I've reviewed so many different search engines – some of them people search engines – that I've become somewhat jaded. What can 123People give me that would make me more likely to use it to find someone than, say, ZoomInfo or Spock or even Google?
Austria-based 123People says that it “looks into nearly every corner of the Web to help you find information on everyone you (want to) know.” They draw their data from “an extensive list of international sources like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, YouTube and Wikipedia.” The data they return includes images, videos, phone numbers, email addresses, social networking profiles, and more.
All of this might sound a little like a privacy invasion, but the search engine explicitly limits itself to information that is publicly available on the Internet. It does not find password-protected information. It doesn't “match” any information; it only lists the search results separated by type. 123People went through months in private beta before launching in the US in late October 2008. As you would expect from all good start-ups, it has its own blog -- in fact, it has two: one in English and one in German.
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