Yasni Puts the People in People Search - More Details and Yasni's Future
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Finding what you want is a little trickier when you're looking for someone you don't know well – or that has a common last name. We just hired a programmer, and I really couldn't find him in Yasni's results. Or, more precisely, I couldn't be sure which of the many results returned were him – though, to be fair, I could eliminate a few. Perhaps Yasni, and other people search engines, should consider coming up with a way to directly remove results from a particular search, so you could narrow things down. The keyword cloud and tabs help, but sometimes it isn't enough.
That said, there are many things that Yasni gets right. The tag cloud itself is a help, and I like the way that Yasni groups several results from the same source (such as Amazon) under one heading. I'm not sure how well combining people search with profiles and some social aspects (you can invite others to join and send and receive messages, for example) will work out, but Yasni isn't the only one trying this; Spock also lets you “claim” profiles and add relevant information.
Yasni founder and CEO Steffen Ruehl has a very clear vision for the company. He wants his search engine to be able to find “anybody across the web.” “It's cliché to say we want to be the Google of people search,” Ruehl admits, but it's very clear that whenever someone intends to look up a person on the Internet, he wants them to think of Yasni first as the go-to place for people search.
It's not an easy goal. The company has only been around since 2007, after all, and despite its traffic, it's definitely still in the start-up phase. At the time of this writing, it employs 20 people and boasts three offices, all in Germany. In addition to the potential resource issues this raises (which Yasni deals with admirably), there is the competition Yasni faces from other people search engines that have been around longer – and indirectly from Google, which is still the search engine that most people think of first for ANY kind of Internet search, whether they're trying to get information on a person, product, disease or what have you. But it already has some good ideas, and it will be interesting to see how they develop.
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