Can you imagine trying to sort through billions of web pages without a search engine? Inconceivable! They make it easy and fast to find information. Now how about finding one of the six billion people on the planet. Where’s the Google of people search? As it turns out, an entire industry of people search engines is ramping up. In this series, I’ll be looking at the people search engines: existing ones that are revitalizing, brand new ones that have emerged and yes, whether or not Facebook will be the one to consume them all.
People search certainly isn’t new. As Michael Tanne, CEO of Wink, points out, in the days before mainstream transportation everyone knew everything about everyone else in a village. And if you didn’t know someone, all you had to do was ask around: low-tech but very effective people search. But the world got bigger and eventually came tools like white pages and public records. With the internet, this data was ported online and made more easily searchable. Internet communities that enabled people to create profiles populated with their interests added a whole new facet to people searching. The latest services take all of these elements and throw social networking, blogs, Wikipedia, Flickr, and the proverbial web 2.0 kitchen sink into the mix.
