Note: This post has been updated to show replies from three People Search Alts.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, was buzzing about the revelation that in a month Facebook is going to allow search engines access to “basic information” about their users, unless the user blocks them via their privacy settings.


How does this affect the Alternative People Search Engines?

Om Malik made this comment on his GigaOM blog:

“This development is going to strike fear in the hearts of entrepreneurs behind people-search startups that have mushroomed in recent months and have raised many millions in venture backing. It is also be a worrisome development for reputation-based systems such as Rapleaf that are creating profiles of people on the web. With the growing database of names, it is only a matter of time before Facebook rolls out a reputation system, and pegs it to an e-commerce engine.”

Is that true?  Is this news really going to strike fear in the hearts of the alternative search engines?

I think that the obvious thing to do is - wait for it - ask them!

AltSearchEngines is going to put this question to these People Search Engines, and then we’ll update this post Thursday or Friday:

  PeekYou

“This was a very exciting development – although the entire reaction has been strange.  Facebook’s public profiles have existed for months (we have many already on PeekYou), yet most people had no idea they were out there.  While I recognize that this upsets plenty of people who trusted Facebook to keep their information private, I personally think it is a great thing for PeekYou and for people search in general – the more information that is out there, the easier it is for us to link our data sources.  The goal of PeekYou is to re-index the entire web around people (instead of keywords), and the more links and public information we are able to access, the easier our job becomes.” 

  Wink

“Far from striking fear in the hearts of People Search Engines like Wink, the move by Facebook to provide Public Search Listings of its users is a welcome, and in fact highly anticipated step.  It enhances the value of People Search engines who can now include one of the rich sources of profiles that was previously absent.  For some time now, sites like LinkedIn, Bebo and MySpace have already provided a public view of profiles separate from the private view.”

“For People Search Engines, the move is like Amazon making itself available to Shopping Engines.  It adds another fabulous source.  It doesn’t kill the Shopping Engines.  It doesn’t make everyone in the world shop at Amazon.  And just because Amazon provides powerful search within the Amazon site, does not make the Shopping Engines any less valuable.”

“This is a great move for Facebook, because their users become more reachable and the community becomes more valuable.  And it’s a great move for People Search Engines, because another great source of profiles is available.  We just hope that they will let people include more data in the Public Search Listing, such as location, school, work, etc.  We also want to be sure that people have complete control over their own information and can choose to maintain their privacy.”

  Spock

“Not at all!!  We have been asking facebook for weeks if they will have public views for engines like us to crawl.  We were quite happy at this development and wished that Facebook did this sooner. 

Think about what this does for Spock:

1. Creates even more places on the public web where people are and need to be searched. More fragmentation is in our best interest.
2. Makes our current users more happy since we get dozens of emails everyday asking when will we have facebook results in Spock. 
3. Every other major social network has contacted us and wants to make sure that we crawl them as soon as possible. They all see the value in being on Spock and users being directed to their site from Spock. 

People must take into consideration that the web is HUGE and that people information is all over the place and that there are billions of documents about people on the web that are scattered and disorganized.”

Conclusion:

Well, we didn’t hear from every People Search search engine, but based on this sample, these alterative search engines actually anticipated, requested, and/or benefited from this move.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 5:04 pm and is filed under News, Updates. 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.

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