September 4, 2008
123people: A People Search Engine
123people is a search engine that was seeking to exploit the emerging market for people searching. I first came across it and tracking its progress since it has been shortlisted in the Plugg top 20 European startups. It is an European, specifically an Austrian-based startup and slowly gaining momentum with the developed of the people search add-on for Ubiquity as well as offering an add-on for the Firefox browser.
People search represented another major growth opportunity for a new startup like 123people. Although there is no actual statistical data on how big the market share for people search, but there is always a need in searching for a particular human being on the search engines. 123people is primarily a data or human profile aggregator, type in any name the friend you’re searching for, it will pull a detailed information on that name, in the forms of weblinks, images, videos, social networking profiles, emails, phone numbers, blogs, documents, IM, as well as the news related to that name. You can find a particular name appeared on the social networks mainly from Facebook, but notable mentions also go to some sites with extension lists of name sources such as Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Xing, YouTube and Wikipedia.
Currently, 123people offered users with the options to search people with the name appeared on its Austria, Germany, Switzerland, or its Worldwide site. In overall, 123people is about people search, and there are lots of other people search engines on the Web today, that include Spock, PeekYou, Yasni, ZoomInfo, Wink, and WikiYou (not available at the time of my writing).
