By Guest Author Juergen Plieninger, who generously translated these German search engines.

Searching for names and people must generate better results than the results of a search with the name as phrase (in parenthesis) in a common search engine. And the same must be afforded for image search.

Recently in Germany, with yasni and 123people, two effective people search engines entered the search market. They have a similar performance to each other, but have each other their differences. Yasni only offers a search interface in German (but it is easy for foreigners to type in the name and to interpret the results), while 123people also offers search interfaces in English, French and Italian. Yasni orders the results merely in one column, 123people in categories. Yasni has the option to relate results to specific persons, 123peoples doesn’t mind about how many people are represented in the results – the searcher himself must separate and reassign them to relevant people. But let me first present to you both search engines, before I compare them with each others’ search interfaces.

123people is a kind of meta search engine, mixing its own data with those of conventional search engines. If you load 123people with the top level domain.de, the German search interface will be loaded, with .com the US view. The choice of countries, which you can choose below the input field, is international, as options you have Germany, Austria, Switzerland, USA and the world. But it doesn’t really matter, I can find American people with the German search interface, with 80 % of the available results in the U.S. interface.
Well, you insert the names, user acronyms, perhaps with the town, where the person lives or works – and search!

The results are presented in several categories. These categories are constantly expanded. A headline gives information about the number of results in the several categories. Under the headline, the image results are displayed. Then the categories are ordered in two columns. On the left, results of e-mail-addresses, weblinks, blog contents and biographical contents are located, on the right telephone numbers, chat/microblogging results, videos, a tagcloud, news services and documents. The footer is the category of results from social services like facebook, myspace and so on. The categories are well sized, if there are more results, you have the option to display more results.The presentation of results is transparent in title and content description.

The value of a search with 123people can be described with a clear categorized meta search with a well ordered display of results without having the feeling of being overwhelmed with information. A bit negative is the sometimes inserted advertisement of promotion of services with costs of 123people.

The effort one must make is to order results to several persons, especially in the case of common names or of persons not so well known. You can see this effect particularly at the results of images, if for example you’re searching for a woman and the image shows a man. Not every time is this effect is so evident. (Only in the case of video search results, the evidence is given.I seldom found a relevant result in this category!) That means: You must invest time and carefulness to evaluate the results. For this, the tag cloud is sometimes helpful, when you can choose items to refine your search.

yasni on the other hand tries to solve the dilemma of the correlation of the results to real persons in the manner to order the results in one column and to invoke the user to correlate several results to a profile of a person. Will that work? It’s the old experiment of somewhat social services, to let the user make the work, but it works only, if the user has clear advantages of this. We will see!

The results are arranged to the several sources they came from. It is possible to reorder them with tabs in the categories; private, profession, and others. At the right side the options are offered to refine or broaden the search, a tag cloud and image results and an option to find people of the persons network. Also here is a clear user interface, but not so enriched and structured like 123people. And the number of results is limited, no matter in which category you click at “more results” a new window pops up and offers more results by sending an e-mail some times later.

Both personal search engines are offering results, that are not (so easily) available in usual search engines. A part of this effect is due to the examination of special sources, for example of social forums, another part is due to the transparent presentation of relevant results. Anyway one always gets results for examples of people mentioned seldomly in the web. Here they are easy to discover as they are in the results of usual search engines.

If we compare the two with other popular people search engines, they also look beneficially: Spock is overloaded with advertisement, but gives more information about networks of people and topics, offers the possibility to label entries with tags and the subscription of RSS-feeds. On the other side is ZoomInfo, a deep digging service in the sectors of VIP- and economy- people search, but it is overwhelming with the mass of results. There are the both yasni and 123people in the middle, like – for example – pipl.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 7:00 am and is filed under Global, Guest Authors, Reviews, Verticals. 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.