If you don’t know what a search engine is, you should probably not be a member of society. Well, that’s not true, but you probably use one every day! It’s called Google, or Yahoo!, or LiveSearch. However, did you know that there are different search engines for different types of searches? People search engines are search engines, like Google that weed out everything and help you find just people. There are many different people search engines to choose from that produce varying people search results, here are some of the more popular people search engines explained:

Spock is a beta site with a mission to create a search engine completely devoted to people searches. It has aspirations of being the online leader in personal search founded on their claim to have over one hundred million people already indexed, while adding millions every day. Spock differs from other search engines in that it is a vertical search engine. It has a person-centric perspective when a query is entered. It interprets every keyword entered, as if it is only about people. The site provides a rich set of attributes that characterize people, like geography, birthday, occupation, etc. It allows the customer to use tags as links or relationships between people. The designers of the site also created a self-correcting mechanism via a user feedback loop.

Wink is a free people search engine that allows you to find people on social networks like MySpace, Bebo, and Friendster. Wink also acts as a social network by allowing you to create your own Wink profile. The site lets you search by name, location, work, school, and even interests. It results are yielded from over 200 million people’s profiles from different social networks, including your own. Results don’t just include people’s profiles either. Wink also searches web sources such as Wikepedia and IMDB.com. This enables users to search for celebs, old friends, new friends, and business contacts. The service allows people to manage their online presence by claiming online places and keeping track of people they know by combining feeds from various sites. Wink makes it easy to find a person on several sites with just one search.

Peek You is another people search engine whose name is a synonym of the phrase “People Seek”. Like other people search engines, it is intended for people to search and find people online. The site is generated and maintained by contributors and gives users access to internet links related to actual people. Creating a PeekYou profile helps other people find your websites, social networking pages, photos, or anything else about you online. You can also create a profile just for friends and relatives to ensure that they may also be easily found online. If you’re so inclined, you can even register to become a full Contributor, which allows you to track your edits to PeekYou as well other added benefits.

Though the most reliable people search engine out there is Private Eye, which will search over two billion records to find someone for you. PrivateEye and people search engine like it will not pull up websites and social networking profiles. You’re only able to receive real records and contact information, which is often more useful. Not only can you do advanced people searches and reverse phone searches, but you can also run background checks. So if you want a more serious people search, then head on over to Private Eye.

I’m constantly trying to find people now the Internet makes it so easy. There are tons of people I regret not telling off. Now I have a second chance to give them unsolicited information they don’t want or need to hear!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 5:31 pm and is filed under Where Would I Be Without Friends and Family?... A Vacat. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.