Google's mastery of search sometimes makes us forget its shortcomings. Specialized search engines insist that they deliver better, more relevant results for their particular fields. That seems especially true in the area of people search, despite the many search engines in this field that fall short of their promises. Today I'm going to take a look at Yasni, and see if it stands apart from its competition.
People search engine Yasni recently launched in the United States, but it boasts European roots. It was reviewed by Killer Start Ups, but already delivers numbers beyond what you would expect from a typical start-up: nearly 24 million page views per month and about eight million monthly visitors in five countries. That doesn't hold a candle to Google, which fielded more than six billion searches from the US alone in October 2008, according to comScore Media Matrix. But every company has to start somewhere, and there are site owners who would kill for that kind of traffic.
So how does Yasni do it? “We run an extensive global people search resource, and have gathered a lot of public data about what people look for and how they act on that information,” explained Steffen Ruehl, Yasni founder and CEO. “Global” is certainly the right word for this search engine; its pull-down menu includes options for Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the UK, and of course the US. It's also global in the sense of the sources it indexes; Phil Bradley noted in his blog that the search engine pulls results from Wikipedia, Amazon, LinkedIn, NamesDatabase, MySpace, Friendster, Jigsaw, Vox, jobster, IMDb, Google News and blog search, Bloglines, Find a Grave and more.
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