Last week I introduced you to Yasni, which bills itself as the world's most popular people search engine. It offers some good figures to back up that claim. It's based in Germany; is it ready for a US audience? Is it worth registering to use? That's what we're about to find out.
We left off last time with my registering with Yasni by giving them my name and email address, and clicking on a link in an email to confirm. That's hardly enough to create a profile. There is an option on the home page when I'm logged in now for me to extend my profile, and I'll do that in a bit. Right now, since my lack of knowledge of the German language kept me from using Yasni before I became a registered user (and thus got access to the English version of the web site), I'm going to show you what Yasni returns when you do a people search. Hint: it may actually be worth the effort to register.
To give you a better appreciation of how much you get, I'm going to show you a full screen shot, and then close-ups of some of the important sections, with explanations. Keep in mind, I wasn't able to include the portions you'd have to scroll down to see; Yasni gives you long pages when it delivers results. So here's what I got when I entered Judith Bemis, the name of a close friend of mine:
Okay, I'll start with the top rectangle (between the two thick yellow-orange bars) and proceed clockwise. First, there's a red link that says “I know Judith Bemis;” clicking on that enables you to send invites to people to have them join your network. The red link below that says “I'm looking for Judith Bemis.” Clicking that takes you to a box that offers two options. One is to request the complete results of your search, and have Yasni email them to you in 24 hours. The other is to place a missing person ad with Yasni's partner Homundus.
You don't normally get these kinds of options with a search engine, so an explanation is in order. Yasni returns plenty of results, but it is a little slow; they don't have Google-sized resources after all. So when you do a search, you don't quite get everything. If you want more, you can request Yasni to email the full set to you, and you will receive an email from them within 24 hours with everything they could find. The second option, placing an ad with Homundus, isn't free. According to Yasni, Homundus is an experienced international people finder, and can find people even after decades. All that Yasni does is provide the initial contact. I haven't seen either of these options with any other search engine of any kind.
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