PeekYou people search can't find Jack
The PeekYou people search engine launched today in open beta. It's yet another site (see Wink and Spock) designed to help you find people.
Surely we can do better than this.
(Credit: CNET Networks)If you're interested in this space, my recommendation is to use Wink. Spock is still in closed beta, and PeekYou's current beta is unimpressive. Despite the company's claim of 50 million people in the database, there are many duplicates (over 700 entries for George Bush, each with a few links--and typing George W. Bush doesn't work to narrow the results). And there's no good way to tell who's who in a list of similar names. Which of the seven Stephen Hawkings returned is the physicist? None of them, as it turns out (the one link tagged with a U.K. location goes to a fake MySpace page).
In searching for my own name (vanity, thy name is Blogger), I found links to an out-of-date personal blog, MySpace, and Ryze (a social network I haven't used since 2002), but nothing current. No Webware, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
PeekYou claims similar features to Spock and Wink: Users can "claim" their own profile and even make themselves unlisted. But my advice is to not get sucked into this product. It's barely ready for public access, and certainly not worth the time if you've got an important search to do.
We're also checking out Gleamd, an aggregator on comments about people, which is still in private beta.
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe.
With respect to the multiple listings of some famous people, both Spock and Wink suffer from the same problem of multiple listings of such individuals:
http://wink.com/people/nm/george%20bush/
Regardless, people are not going to use PeekYou or Spock or Wink to find out where Bush or Hawking exist online. But if you are looking for the not-so-famous George Bush of Pensacola, Florida, for instance, PeekYou's navigation bests Google, Wink or Spock, allowing you to quickly narrow down and find that guy quicker and easier.
BTW -- The PeekYou profile for Raef Needleman had 7 or 8 relevant links (his wink page has 1 - his spock page has 4). PeekYou is a beta in progress with many new features in the pipeline -- so are Spock and Wink -- the winner in this new market is very much yet to be determined. By launching an open beta PeekYou wants to give the world the chance to see the engine we are building and invite the public to play a part in helping grow the platform into what we intend it to be--- the ultimate people search engine for everyone not named George W. Bush.