I moderated a fascinating panel tonight at Google headquarters that included execs from three “people search engines” - the CEO of Wink (Michael Tanne), the CEO of Spock (Jaideep Singh), and the COO of Zoominfo (Bryan Burdick).
The panel was very timely. Earlier today the Wall Street Journal published an article called “You’re Nobody Unless Your Name Googles Well” that outlined the exact problem these search engines are trying to solve - finding information about people on the web, many of whom have identical names. The article didn’t mention the efforts of these startups, instead focusing entirely on Google, but it did note a few interesting statistics. There are, for example, 158 million results on Google for the name “John Smith” (I actually see 225 million, but who’s counting).
Big statistics are thrown around when people talk about people search. Singh says around 30% of searches are people-related. Tanne says 2 billion searches per month are on people (Facebook data tends to suggest this is probably vastly underestimated).
Still, it’s not clear that this market is huge. The big advertising dollars tend to come in for product and service-related searches, not for searches on John Smith.
Spock, Wink and Zoominfo each have very different products, reflecting their different philosophies on business models, target markets, and control over information.
Wink
Wink changed course in November 2006 and began providing search results on people from social networks like MySpace, LinkedIn and Bebo. Users search based on name, geography and other criteria (company, school, whatever) and see results from major social networks. Tanne says they now have over 175 million distinct individuals indexed on their site.
Users can claim their Wink profile, proving their ownership of various profiles on social networks by entering in the email they use for those accounts.
Wink relies on advertising for revenue, and Tanne says they can get $2 or so in revenue per thousand page impressions. He also hinted at other revenue streams down the road, such as lead generation for other services.
Wink raised $7 million in venture capital but did a partial stock buy-back earlier this year.
Spock
Spock hasn’t launched yet, but the demos we’ve seen show it to be a direct competitor to Wink. The company, which raised $7 million in a Series A round of financing, is in private beta and should launch in the next couple of months.
See our overview for a more complete description of the service. Spock is an ambitious effort - Singh says they will index the entire web to search for people-related data, although for now they are focusing on high payoff sites like Wikipedia.
Once data is found, Spock analyzes it to de-dupe others with the same or similar name and then creates a user profile for the individual. Tags are created dynamically and relationships with other individuals are noted. Readers can then add additional tags or vote the existing ones up or down. An individual can also claim their own profile by proving their identity, and get enhanced voting power on their descriptive tags.
Like Wink, Spock is focused on generating advertising revenue.
Spock will generate a lot of controversy because individuals are not in complete control of their profile. The community decides on descriptive tags for a person, so Bill Clinton’s profile includes such terms as “sex scandal” and “impeached United States Official.” Litigation is sure to follow from celebrity types not happy with their Spock profile, but Singh said flat out tonight that the site will firmly fight any attempts to defy the community’s decisions on descriptive tags. I’m betting there are one or two legal precedents out there on this, perhaps involving Wikipedia disputes.
Spock also has a vertical logo, which is totally cool.
Zoominfo
Zoominfo was the black sheep of the group. They were founded long ago, in 2000, making them a great grandfather by Internet startup standards. They are well into their revenue phase with $12 in sales last year, and are profitable.
The service is completely business focused (it’s more of a competitor to LinkedIn than Wink or Spock) and pulls data from press releases and corporate bios on websites. A lot of data is free, but certain searches require a subscription that starts at $100/month. They’ve recently updated their site with a more contemporary design, but their business model of keeping data behind a paywall is very web 1.0 (hey, they’re profitable though).
Who’s Best?
Zoominfo is a solid business, but elicited little enthusiasm from the attendees at the panel this evening. Press release quotes and corporate bios just don’t get these Silicon Valley types fired up. Spock is yet to launch and has the benefit of controlling its messaging and user experience for the time being. Controversy sells, and the first few profile disputes are sure to bring lots of traffic to the site. But until it launches there’s just no way to effectively judge it. Wink is a solid search engine but people are still digesting the “bad” news of its product shift away from more traditional search and it’s stockholder buyout.
There are many others playing in this sandbox too, such as Streakr , ProfileLinker, LinkedIn and Upscoop. Many of these overlap a lot with Wink, but less so with Spock. As I mentioned above, it’s also not clear just how big this people search “sand box” really is.
Comments
I think there needs to be a delineation made between different kinds of “people search”. As it was put in the Search SIG panel notes, there is a difference between sites which focus on the head or the tail. Those who focus on the tail are what I would call White Pages businesses. All of the above sites seem to fit into that category. Those sites who focus on the head are what I would call Who’s Who businesses. Wikipedia is the best Who’s Who site out there at the moment, with much smaller competitors like NNDB, and vertical sites like IMdB.
Personally, White Pages for Web 2.0 doesn’t interest me, though I’m sure it’s a viable model. My own pre-beta site, Tinfinger, is squarely in the Who’s Who category, and I’m glad to see that the above companies aren’t really competing in our space.
> They are well into their revenue phase with $12 in sales last year, and are profitable.
Wow. They don’t have much expenses then
I think the really big opportunity in people search is not necessarily around advertising. It’s more likely to be in people related services such as recruiting, brokering business introductions, and background checks/reputation verification.
umm the search isn’t as advanced as it could be. It was only helpful 1/5 searches I made.
What about http://www.naymz.com ?
They have gone as far as to place google adwords for my name:
http://www.google.com/search?h.....n+percival
“They are well into their revenue phase with $12 in sales last year, and are profitable.”
I need to find out where they source their staff from. Being profitable from just $12 in revenue is pretty impressive. It seems a lot of web 2.0 are trying to follow their lead.
I think that a separate people search engine can’t be a large business since it has to crawl and index data from all over the Web, just like a regular search engine, and compete to it. Its advantage should come from a better display and categorization of data.
Josh, if you find out, let me know
I am not a big of fan of self-promotion, but considering the relevancy of Michael’s post today in relation to our business model I am inclined to comment. At Top20Network.com we feel that people search isn’t about sifting through 225 million people out there named John Smith. In fact, we don’t even think that people want to actually search for people using a specialized search engine. There will always be press releases where you can find the information you need about famous individuals, businesses, and most common folk too. When it comes to the “sand box of people search” our company doesn’t feel that it is about finding individuals, because anyone can do that with Google. We feel that people search is more about finding individuals that you can interact with easily and increasing the likelihood that you will receive an email response. If you don’t actually contact the person then what is the use, you might as well be a stalker on Facebook. People are phenomenal resources. We believe that any people search company aiming to provide a good product will have the most success when finding a way to properly organize the “useful” information about individuals, and then offer it to the community in a way that maintains privacy for the individual and promotes interaction—this is a very difficult task.
Many companies experience success here on different levels, but Linkedin.com is like searching for someone on the beach, this has its place, but we have built Top20Network.com as a precise sand box. We think of LinkedIn as Manhattan, and Top20Network as the Hamptons. A bold comparison, but our goal is to build our people search sand box using method utilized by Facebook—start building tools for communities that are already communicating. We contend that if you do this then the advertising dollars will end up in your niche sand box. Look at Conduit and you will see what I mean. People search is about tapping into the resources of individuals, and I would much rather search through 100,000 well-connected people that know 10 million, then start with 225 million John Smiths and attempt to contact the right one.
This party will not last. Google is currently working on People Search and like so many other things when they launch its game over for the rest of the industry.
http://www.ebizmba.com
What about Pipl?
These sites will be as successful as how well the show up on Google’s SERPs.
Also, with the rise of personilzed results it’s more likley the name you’re looking for will be name your looking for…even if someone else has it.
Not to mention, a large percentage of name searches are vanity searches.
I covered this event on my blog and it did not address people who did not want to be found. There could be a unique business model of unsearch or delisting.
http://www.djcline.com/?p=1176
Hypesphere
Find whos creating hype in different social sphere.
http://www.hypesphere.com
I searched for myself and found it had two listings for me: LinkedIn and Live Spaces. I created an account and claimed the LinkedIn page. But it keeps telling me I am using a bad username and password on the spaces account (I double-checked and logged in just fine). Then I added several more sites. Several worked fine. Most require the placement of their microid code in the header of the page. Since I don’t have access to the HTML at most places, they are going to stay unverified. The one that I did, my own site, the verification process always fails. They may just be having a bad day, but so far I am not impressed.
Josh, Henk - I’m the recruiter here at ZoomInfo - thanks for teeing me up
- hard to resist responding. Sourcing at ZoomInfo is a pretty straightforward idea, and one that lots of firms give lip service to: we hold out for really incredible people -smart dreamers who can implement their ideas. They’re worth 3 B-players. It’s like Brooks’ idea from “The Mythical Man-Month” - throwing more & more resources (people) at a project doesn’t move the production needle nearly as effectively as understanding the problem, and attacking it intelligently.
So, if you’re interested in hearing more, feel free to reach out - also, we’ve got a job on the CrunchBoard (linked) that I’m betting somebody might want to take a look-see at. (Yup, another blatant plug).
People search is an interesting space. As of right now, Google dominates it
I know it’s trite, but these companies need to think about their actual use cases and then cater to them. ZoomInfo is aimed at business folks for a reason. Outside of searching for a specific someone in a business setting, what’s left? Stalking? Genealogy maybe (geni).
Best,
Alex Rudloff
Emurse.com
Spock is courting controversy in more way than one. Their challenge for the computational linguistics scientists was a big archive of web pages collected from the public web (even including a couple pages with a virus).
I believe caching of web pages is only allowed for direct use and not for redistribution. This could lend them in serious legal troubles.
Sorry to interject this, but volunteering for a non-profit and knowing how hard they work [usually for very little money] I have to call out here that this event’s organizers are not mentioned anywhere. It was not a Google event (Google is a sponsor in that they host the SIG-Special Interest Group- at their location) that the volunteers for SDForum, a silicon valley non-profit for technology professionals, get their credit for putting on great events.
http://www.sdforum.org/index.c.....ntID=12854
(I volunteer for their sister org http://www.ebig.org).
Bah, you just need a name like Gal Josefsberg and then you don’t care about any of these search engines. There’s only one baby! Oh, and I’ll get you mr. Greg Josefsberg for taking gjosefsberg as your screenname on Yahoo!!
GJ
http://www.60in3.com
For those of you that haven’t received an invitation to Spock, I just thought I’d point you in the direction of a screencast demo I made. It’s posted on the Spock blog:
http://blog.spock.com/2007/04/.....-on-spock/
There is NO WAY that they can be profitable with 12 dollars in revenue. Even getting a basic web host cost about 20 bucks per year. Is this supposed to be 12 million?
“John Smith” returns 1.85MM results. Otherwise you’re searching for the words John and Smith not “John Smith” the person.
I am one of the Co-Founders at ProfileLinker and I wanted to speak to our role in the “sandbox”. At ProfileLinker we provide users with a centralized profile where their different online identities can be managed. We fit into the people search “sandbox” because of our ability to allow users to discover members based on social network affiliations as well as liked interests. In comparison with other companies in the people search space, we are not direct competitors because our company focuses on easing the interactions between our users and their social networks as well as our users and their different networks of people. This is a contrast to the aforementioned companies that primarily focus on indexing people and information from across the web, as Google does.
Michael, great job moderating - you and the audience both raised lots of good, challenging questions about people search. Thanks so much to the organizers at SDForum for putting on these events - and Google for hosting.
No mention of Jigsaw? I’m surprised you didn’t mention them again, seeing as how you’d made it a point to post about how “Jigsaw is evil”
How about this one?
TallStreet.com
wow zoominfo made 12 bucks (or is that 12 million Mr Arrington)
And yet they are profitable
I was very disappointed when Wink decided to switch from social search to people search.
Jomathan Mendez: “Not to mention, a large percentage of name searches are vanity searches.”
Hah, that’s so true. I have a friend that I’ve written about in the past. About a year ago I made a blog post mentioning some of the search terms that have brought people to my site, and his name was one of them. Just last week he left a comment on that post along the lines of “I’m so cool people search for my name”
He was totally vanity searching to find that post
The thing I do not like about the common search engines is, that they do not recognize documents with similar content. It happens often on the Web that a post or document is spread out over more then 50 websites. Now that is great for the author but not for the searcher because it blows up your search result unnecessarily. With InfoCodex this will not happen because the linguistical database recognizes similar documents and puts them into groups. This does not blow up your search result unnecessarily.
http://www.ywesee.com/pmwiki.p.....xProcedure
Three things a modern Search engine should do:
1. Automatically classify a document according to its content.
2. Automatically generate an abstract of a document.
3. Generate a Heat-Map of the Contents of a Search Result.
http://www.ywesee.com/uploads/.....2.2007.pdf
Identity control is the key and much more than be found among persons with similar names. It is about showing a clean profile of you. In the course of our live we do many thinks, and many of us get an eclectic profile in the pages search. Stuff we are proud of, others less proud of.
This is what Ziki is about: centralize in one place all you information, make it as your resume or platform for self-promotion. Ziki manages your profile on major search engines to make displayed on the top. When people click on it, they see what you want them to see. You are in control..
http://www.ziki.com
Another fun wrinkle for these types of search engines is distingushing between real, live, breathing humans, and fictional ones. This includes characters in movies, books, tv shows, as well as any of a plethora of fake identities used by con artists, spies, smugglers, and like.
In a way, by linking types of relationships together and making intelligent-enough algorithms, one might be able to use these kinds of people-search engines to *identify* if a person is a spy, con artist, etc, based on whether or not their identity / network is *like* one.
And again, I don’t quite see the business model, aside from paid-subscription … at which point, it seems to be not unlike ussearch.com in a way (with the exception that US Search doesn’t spider the ‘net, and bases its info on public information held by various levels / kinds of government entities).
As I was telling one of the Spock guys at this meeting, it would be useful to have some kind of a “social/web rating” for people (similar to a FICO score).
So I could, for example, search for Michael Arrington, and get a “producer” score of 95.x (leaving room for growth
Bill Clinton would have a low “producer” but a high “presence” score. A high “quality” blogger would have a higher score than a not so great one. Al Gore would have a score of…
Achieving this would require a non-trivial analysis of a person’s online presence - blogs, links, MySpace/Facebook/YouTube/LinkedIn etc profiles and more. Then these 3 companies could become the web equivalent of Experian/Equifax/Transunion.
Where do all the paid public records service providers come into play here? It is my opinion that these services remain profitable because the laymen user does not know how to correctly use all of the existing free people search technologies.
Furthermore, all of the major players (http://www.peoplefinders.com and http://www.intelius.com) and their affiliates occupy the top paid spots for the major keyword terms. When will Spock, Wink and Zoominfo and move into the paid placement space? It would be nice to finally click on an ad that promised “free people search” and have it be true.
Lastly, I am not seeing a big pairing up of the major “traditional players” in the people search space pairing up with the newcomers (with the exception of http://www.reunion.com and Wink). Do you think that this new “war” will see the new absorb the old and allow users to be in control of their contact and public records information?
Even though there is a certain amount of excitement of finding a person on the social networking sites, there is little information that leads to actually finding a person. There will always be a need for other search types that provice “locating” information, such as peoplesearch.com and other similar sites. However, there is relatively little one can do at this point to keep their personal information out of the public records systems, and even less a person can do to keep their info from being available on the internet.
Looking for Friends and Family?
PeopleSearches.com
http://www.PeopleSearches.com
Check out free people search at http://seekstreet.com
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