People Search!
September 29, 07 by BharaniI realized that Linkedin.com, a leading professional networking platform and Orkut.com, leading social networking site are working towards exposing their respective data through APIs. This is great news to “People Search Engines” like Pipl.com and Spock.com. Till now these engines have been crawling all public urls of Social networking sites, name databases and blogs (technorati does host the details of people behind the registered blogs). Even with the limited information extraction, the quality of search has been good. With the exposure of the data from the social networking sites, the quality of search would improve highly because of rich and structured information available.
educatedunemployed Says: 30.09.07 at 9:41 pm
I typed in 3 names. Didn’t return any searches. This just feels like another allowed invasion into our lives.
Punit Sethi Says: 09.10.07 at 4:04 pm
This is a very interesting development from the perspective of integration of social networks as well - we often experience some of our friends being on facebook while other being on orkut and so on. However, I am sure the amount of information exposed through APIs will not be enough for another SN site to use these folks’ user base for integration..
Bharani Says: 10.10.07 at 8:44 pm
Hi Malika, Which names did you try? It is a fair assumption that the search will be successful only to the extent of one’s presence in the virtual world (blog, linkedin profile, articles, websites, etc.,). Wait for few more months, even the Instant messenger contact details will be made searchable
Hi Punit, I agree with you that the exposure will be done to such an extent, which will not erode the site’s value.