j’s scratchpad

For those of you interested in people search, Vanessa Fox profiles the search engines Wink, Spock, and ZoomInfo in the October issue of Information Today. (The issue is not freely available on the Web.) They pull information about people from various sources, including social networking sites, business databases, Wikipedia, and weblogs. Wink particularly sounds interesting to me because it allows people to claim themselves in the database and control what information other people can find about them there. Be careful what you put on the Web. It’s becoming easier to find everything every day.

Wink does not have my current job. I left Harvard almost 9 months ago. Otherwise, the results look ok. The biggest error I noticed is that they show the completely wrong URL for the search engine Feedster.

Spock goes to someone who is very much not me for my given name. There aren’t any other records for people who share the name, so I don’t know how to say “This information is not for the person for whom I was searching” and to search again. I don’t appear in the results at all for my nickname and these results are very similar to what Wink had.

Similar to Wink, ZoomInfo has my former employer and profession listed in their records. What’s also amusing is that they have the completely wrong contact information for where I used to work. They link my job to an academic department when the office was not part of any academic department. I find the style of the pages distracting. It’s difficult to tell the difference between what blocks are ads and what blocks actually have real content from the search. Registration is necessary to view all of the search results and fully use the site.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 8:16 pm and is filed under Search Engines. 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.