Social Search and the winner for now is..........
A social search or people engine searches engines can be used to find individual people who have active web and social network user profiles. Most of them searches on Technorati, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, LinkedIn, Live Spaces, and other sources.
The people searches includes Wink, Streakr, Lijit, Ziki, Mugshot, ClaimID, and PreFound (Source Arnaud Fischer's blog.) All of them allow you to create your own profile.
All of them are great tools for tracking individual profiles, bloggers, getting news etc even which Google Alerts can do for you but as a researcher I generally start my search based on a skill.
So Which one's useful for you?
Mugshot is a Red Hat venture; developed in the context of an open source community project. You have to be logged in to do a people search. If you are photo search person .. Good for you IF not SKIP this site.
Ziki - It claims to be a place for you personal and professional promotion. Yes and it does that. It have a People , Company and group search with filters which could be very useful for recruiters in future but a simple search and not much to show. SKIP for now
Lijit partnering with feedburner which got bought by Google.. so Lijit = Google ... just kidding! You can create your profile and it’s another Google search for you ... SKIP again.
PreFound - A place you can share information you have found on the web? Why would most people share info about others than for promoting themselves…….. Umm a BIG SKIP
Streakr- A UK based.. It does have a Keyword and location search and came across Mr. Levy on the first page---
....Looked more like a dating site to me….. Skip for Now
ClaimID.. remember hotmail / microsoft's passport idea? Not really useful for recruiters as of date.. SKIP
Wink and Conclusion........ A lot more has to evolve and Staying with Wink for now for the simple reasons of ease of use, its clean, a lot of good search results and the interesting part is that Wink People Search lets you find people by name, location, school, work, and interest anywhere on the web
Stay Tuned.............
WINK
Very comprehensive. I had heard of Wink, but not the other services. I would imagine that these have the potential to be incredible time-savers when searching depending on what you seek....
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Take a look at Pipl (pipl.com), I like the fact that it's not a social search engine as much as it is a people search engine that finds results even when the person has almost no web presence.
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I am a big fan of pipl and have been using it for a while now.. Shally wrote a good article on pipl recently
http://www.ere.net/blogs/CyberSleuthing/1026704CCB784A95A3A43FB31343E46A.asp
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Hello Rithesh,
It not a good idea to skip Ziki, and it is a better idea to come back very soon and check our new functionality and design with a strong focus on social search. It you liked Wink, you are going to love it!
Andre
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Thanks for checking us out but I must point out that we are much more than just "another Google search for you". We allow you to plug in all of your different social content and pick up your blogroll in order to make YOU into a search engine. Your knowledge and connections turn you into a trusted database of knowledge for your readers to access through our search wijit. Plus, there are detailed stats that we provide that give you a better sense of your audience and what they're searching you about. We would love to have you take a second look at what Lijit does and I'd be happy to answer any further questions you may have.
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Thanks for taking the time to check out Wink. It's very gratifying for us that you find our service to be valuable in your research. We know we can always be better so please let us know if there are more ways we can make Wink meet your needs. People search is very exciting and here at Wink we plan to keep innovating. A big focus for us right now is improving the search engine. That's a backend change that will have big payoff for recruiters. We are very excited about this and about everything else we are doing here at Wink. Thanks again Ritesh!
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