Wouldn’t it be great if you could use a search engine without needing to touch your mouse? You know, type your query and then scan and even click through to results without actually clicking the mouse button? Or maybe you’re looking for an alternate source of search advertising data, like how many advertisers are bidding on certain keywords. Or maybe you’re into something more mundane, like finding an apartment to call home.

In this roundup of five search tools you may not know about, I’ll introduce you to possible answers to those questions and a couple more. This is the third in my occasional series that profiles under-the-radar search tools. If you missed the previous two, links to those are at the end. But let’s start with that mouse-free search tool….

keyboardr

For some, the computer mouse is nothing more than an inconvenience. Take my hand off the keyboard? No thanks! keyboardr was invented for people like that. It’s a meta search engine that pulls in results from Google, Wikipedia, and YouTube.

Results begin to appear on the page as you type a query, and once you’re done, the mouse is unnecessary. You can use the up and down arrow keys to navigate from one search result to the next, and hit Enter to open the result in a new window.

AdQuants

This one is for the search marketing crowd. AdQuants is a tool that offers competitive research related to any keyword or URL you provide. If you use or have seen SpyFu, you’ll be familiar with what AdQuants does. (One difference is that AdQuants is a free service that aims to make money via custom research.)

The screenshot shows an AdQuants search for “sunscreen,” and the data includes the number of advertisers bidding on that term, and estimates for average CPC, average daily clicks, and related information.

Tweepz

You might be thinking that we don’t need another Twitter search engine, but Tweepz is a bit different from ones I’ve come across, and it’s already helped me find new people to follow. It’s a search tool to find Twitter users, and it offers more functionality than I’ve seen in other Twitter user search engines. One option is to search based on location, and Tweepz quickly found several people local to my area that I’d never found on other Twitter search sites.

After doing a search you can sort your results by number of followers, number following, or join date. In the right column, there are additional refinements and an RSS feed for your search results. In addition to location-based search, Tweepz lets you search Twitter member names and bios. Good stuff.

123people.com

Whether you’re searching for another person, or searching on your own name, you might be impressed with the wide variety of data that 123people.com pulls together on a single page. A search for my name includes photos (from Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, and other sources) … email addresses (mine, and some from other Matt McGees) … phone numbers (not mine, thankfully) … web links … videos … blog posts and news articles mentioning my name … the Amazon page selling my U2 book and my Amazon wish list … and much more.

If you’re searching for a common name, 123people.com lets you narrow your search by including a city name or zip code. There are a few too many advertisements on the search results page for my taste, but it’s still an interesting people search engine.

MyApartmentMap

MyApartmentMap is a search mashup that pulls in apartment rental data from online classified sites and color codes them by price on a Google Maps interface. The site promises “up to the minute reports” for the entire U.S. The interface includes a drag-and-drop marker (see below) that simplifies the process of finding apartments by price in specific cities and neighborhoods.

The search results pages also show average apartment rental prices for the most recent month, as well as a chart showing 6-month trends for rental prices. Based on a few searches I did, the data appears to be quite good in bigger cities but more hit-and-miss when you get to smaller locales.

UPDATE: FanSnap, an event ticketing search engine I profiled previously in this series, is now out of beta. New features since our previous mention include the ability to see available tickets by zooming to row level at venues, as well as a partnership that adds available tickets from eBay into FanSnap’s search results.

See also:

• 7 Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should
• 5 (More) Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should

Ever searched for yourself on Google and come away dissatisfied, especially if someone else you share a name with seems to dominate the results? Ever looked for someone else and been disappointed that you couldn’t find the person you wanted? Google’s new “Profile Results” launching today aim to correct both problems.

Since the end of 2007, Google has allowed people to create Google Profile pages for use with certain Google services. For example, if you created content in Google Maps, your Google Profile let you share who you were with others using that service. The same profile also served to identify you when using the completely different Google Reader service.

Now Google Profiles are going beyond Google’s own services. They’re being promoted as a way for people to tell the world who they are and, to some degree, being offered as a way for people to claim their identity in Google’s main search results.

“People have no control over how they appear when other people search for them on Google. That’s a big issue we’ve heard,” said Joe Kraus, a director of product management at Google. “The new results are to better control what people see and improve the ability for people to fine what they’re looking for.”

In the new system, a new “Profile results” section will appear at the bottom of a Google search page, when it finds a strong match in response to a name-based search. Up to four profiles will be shown:

You can also search directly for profiles here.

Building Your Profile Page

The profiles all come from Google Profile pages, which means in order for a chance to appear, you’ve got to have a page. That’s fairly easy. There’s no charge to have a page, and you needn’t use any particular Google services, either. Just sign-up here. You can also search for “me” on Google, and if you’re signed-in, you’ll see an option promoting how to make your own profile.

After signing-up, you can provide a variety of information about yourself, including:

• Your picture
• Your first and/or last name
• Nickname
• Where you grew up
• Where you live
• Where you work
• Schools you’ve attended
• A biography
• Links to web sites you wish to list
• Pictures from your Picasa, Flickr or other online photo albums
• Contact information, which can be shared selectively with people

Not all of these options were offered when Profile pages were first launched. The pages have gained more features over time, and the new additions have been pretty poorly communicated, I’d say. If you’re like me, you’ve probably had a fairly bare display.

The new system will cause many people to reexamine their profiles, as they hope to appear in Google’s main results. But with only four spaces, some names will be competitive. Which ones will show? Those that Google feels are “comprehensive enough,” Kraus said.

Does that mean you need to fill out all the fields, including what your “superpower” is? No. Kraus said there are no hard-and-fast rules, especially since the system’s ranking criteria are likely to change over time. But for now, those who at least fill out the form with their first and last name (this is the basic requirement), along with a few links to content, will probably increase the odds of appearing.

Profile Page Options: From Job Title To Links

As an example of what you can do, here’s my profile, which until yesterday had only consisted of my photo, my name and a few links. I’ve pimped it up since then:

Below, you can see how information in my profile’s “What I do” box gets combined with the “Current Company” box to form a job title below my name. Under that, the “Where I live now” box is used to show my location. All this is done using the Edit Profile option:

Whatever you put in these boxes will appear. There’s no attempt to verify that you really do have a job title that you claim to hold or that you work for a particular company. However, there is an option for others to report profiles that they feel are inappropriate.

As for my biography, I used the “Short bio” box to enter what I wanted to appear. This box even allows you to add links to your bio:

For those wondering, so far, these appear to be straight links that do pass PageRank. The nofollow attribute is not used, nor do I see other blocking, so potentially anyone can use their Google profile for link building efforts. I suspect that nofollow will come down the line.

Speaking of links, you’ll notice that in the upper right-hand corner of my profile are several links I’ve listed. These are added using the Links area of your edit profile page:

You can add any links you like. However, Google will also suggest some for you. Sometimes it can tell from information you’ve entered what links might be related to you, using the Google Social Graph. Or enter your FriendFeed link, and it will suggest other services you’ve told FriendFeed about.

As mentioned, you can also add a photo strip to your profile, pulling in pictures from public albums on Google’s Picasa, Yahoo’s Flickr or any URL that provides a photo feed. Just use the Photos tab to do this.

Verified Names & Emails

Now let’s look at two special things showing on my profile, that I have a “Verified name” and a “Verified email,” as shown below:

Don’t go looking on your profile page for the option on how to verify your name. It’s not there. Instead, to have a verified name, you need to enroll in the Google Knol service and verify your name there (see Google Knol – Google’s Play To Aggregate Knowledge Pages). If you’ve done that, you get a verified name. If not, you don’t.

It’s crazy, but it’s also a symptom of how piecemeal Google’s entire profile system feels to have developed over the past year. It’s as if Google drove its social networking car out onto the racetrack back in 2007 to chase after Facebook but kept adding parts to it during the race, without stopping.

Should you get a verified name? Right now, it doesn’t influence whether your profile will rank better in profile results. But if you’re trying to convince people to trust that the page is really controlled by you, it probably makes sense.

Then there’s the verified email. The idea here is that you’ve shown Google that you can send email from a given domain. For example, if you claimed to work for Microsoft, the system allows you to prove that you’ve received email from an address at microsoft.com. Or as the help page says:

When people who know you visit your profile and see, for example, your school’s domain name, they’ll be able to know that it’s the real you on your profile.

As for those who only have email from a free service, such as Yahoo, Hotmail or even Google’s own Gmail, they’re out of luck. These services aren’t seen as trustworthy enough to allow for verification.

While I understand that concern, I also find it odd. If many people start having verified email addresses, then it suggests those who don’t have profiles with verified emails are somehow less trustworthy. And since the entire Profile results system is designed in part to help those with less “net presence,” as Kraus called it, to have a shot of appearing in Google’s results, it’s unfortunate they get discriminated in this way.

Of course, as with verified names, verified email addresses don’t mean you’ll rank better. Those unverified folks have just as good of chance of coming up as the verified people. It just from a perception standpoint, they might have profiles that seem less trustworthy.

Vanity URLs For Profiles

Your profile is a web page, and that means it has its own URL. By default, your URL will be a long string of numbers. For example, my profile is here:

http://www.google.com/profiles/113217924531763968801

Of course, last week there was a great flurry when it was noted that Google started allowing profiles to have “vanity URLs.” Want a URL that uses your own name? You can have it.

Sort of.

It turns out that vanity URL must be the same as your Gmail address. In other words, whatever your address is on Gmail, that’s going to be your address in your vanity URL. If my Gmail address began emperorzorg, then I’d have a vanity URL that looked like this:

google.com/profiles/emperorzorg

Oh joy. If you have a Gmail account, and you claim your vanity URL, then you expose you email address to the world. Google explicitly warns you that this can happen, but it’s still pretty sucky. Why not operate the way that Google’s YouTube does or Yahoo’s Flickr, where you can have a username that is different than your email address?

Kraus said that Google is trying to have a unified namespace, where everyone has one name with Google and things are kept as simple as possible. That means using your Gmail name as your profile’s URL.

But wait! Life certainly isn’t so simple at Google. I actually have at least two active Google accounts, one of which isn’t linked to Gmail at all. I think I got that one by signing up for AdWords or some other service before Gmail existed. I’m also far from the only person in this situation, given I’ve seen ample Google help pages over time on how to transfer a particular service between different Google accounts.

And that non-Gmail account? The good news is that I can use that to get a vanity URL of my choosing. That’s right. Any Google Account not linked with Gmail can set the URL to whatever name they want, assuming that name is free.

Of course, this means that if you have an existing account, you’d have to find a way to move some of your services over to the new one (not always easy or even possible). You might also find the name you want isn’t free. And behind the scenes, if you ever do get a Gmail account? Whatever name you picked will be your Gmail address, Kraus said.

Clearly I’m grumpy over all this. I wish Google had let people pick whatever names they wanted for their URLs and kept it separate from Gmail addresses. But that’s how things are.

Choosing What To Reveal

Unlike with Facebook, there’s no granular control over what you share with the world on your profile. If you list where you grew up, everyone will see that rather than you selectively deciding to share it with just friends or family. It’s all or nothing. So don’t put anything on your page that you’re not comfortable sharing — which is easy, since nothing other than your first and last name is required to show up in search results.

An exception to sharing relates to Contact Info. This is an area where you can list your email addresses, street addresses, phone numbers, IM addresses and your birthday. You can selectively decide which of your friends to share this information with, and you can create groups of friends.

How’s all this play out in the Google-Facebook saga? With most of Facebook’s searches being people-oriented, is this Google trying to take on Facebook in the people search space?

“We already are a people search engine, in that people search for people all the time on Google, so we’re trying to improve it,” Kraus said.

True enough. And the change should be welcomed by many. I’ve regularly gotten email from people wondering how they could show up better for their names, especially in cases where there’s unflattering information about them. Yahoo was recently sued in one case. Personal reputation management is an entirely different issue — but even in those cases, there’s a core of the person wanting to be able to speak for themselves in the search results. The Google Profile results offer a new opportunity for this to happen.

For more, see related discussion on Techmeme.

Twitter announced that you can now use their people search feature to find friends, family or colleagues that are using Twitter.

For example, I wanted to see if any of my immediate family is on Twitter, so I searched for schwartz. It looks like I am the most popular Schwartz on Twitter (ahem). But it does list another 233 people with the name Schwartz, so I will scan through them to see if I know anyone.

I do wish there was an RSS flavor for this search, so I can track particular names. But the normal Twitter Search has RSS, so that works.

According to Reuters, presumptive Republican nominee John McCain is using Google as a tool to do background checks on potential running mates: “You know, basically it’s a Google,” he said to laughter at a fund-raising luncheon when asked how the selection process was going. “What you can find out now on the Internet — it’s remarkable.”

Here’s what he might find on four top potential Republican VP candidates:

–Charlie Crist, governor of Florida –Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor –Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal –Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback

If McCain gets tired of conventional search engines, he can always try specialized “people search” engines.

The Digital Inspiration blog is reporting that Facebook profile images are now appearing as thumbnails in general Yahoo search results (as opposed to image search results).

I tried several times to find the images, using different people’s names along with related phrases including “Facebook profile,” and was unable to duplicate the results. (Google has been including Facebook Profile data in search results for some time.)

Marge Simpson Googling Herself "All this time I thought ‘googling’ yourself meant the other thing."

A PEW/Internet Survey out this week found that 47% of internet users have done ego searches, up from 22% five years ago. That nearly half of internet users are searching for themselves seems excessive, but only 3% say they check regularly. Most (74% of those who have done such searches) have only checked once or twice. As our use of the internet decreases our privacy, the study also found that most internet users don’t find this to be a concern. 61% of adults don’t feel they need to limit the amount of information found out about them online. Only 38% have taken steps to do so.

It makes sense that most people don’t search for themselves regularly, as they probably don’t make internet news often enough for the results to change much. However, as more companies, landlords, and dates use search in addition to or in lieu of background checks, it may be smart for everyone to everyone to “google” themselves periodically to make sure those pictures of that one party never made it online. Reputation management companies have so far focused on businesses and people who are newsmakers, but maybe they should start offering regularly monitoring services up to everyone, like credit reporting services do: www.freereputationmonitoringreport.com.

Is More Information Available Than People Realize? Internet users don’t worry about what’s online about them in part because they don’t realize what might be out there. A quarter to a third think personal information like address and phone number might be online, and only 25% think pictures and written information is available. However, approximately 225 million adults are in the United States (and around 150 million of those are internet users) and whitepages.com, for instance, has contact information for 180 million of them (approximately 80% of the U.S. population). So, more people have more information available about them online than they may realize.

The study found four types of internet users:

• 17% of online adults actively contribute content online, but don’t worry about limiting what’s associated with them.
• 21% of online adults worry about what’s available online and actively take steps to limit it.
• 18% of online adults are concerned about their online visibility, but don’t limit what’s found.
• 43% of online adults don’t think much about online privacy and don’t worry about it, limit it, or spend much time creating content about themselves online.

Nothing to Be Worried About? Maybe people are right not to be concerned. 61% aren’t worried, which tracks well with the 62% who find what they expect when they do an ego search. Only 4% have had bad experiences related to information found about them online. 87% percent say that what they find is accurate, up from 74% five years ago.

Interestingly though, 85% of those surveyed said that it’s “very important” to control who accesses their personal information. This seemingly conflicting set of feelings likely means that online properties such as search engines and social networking sites are wise to offer users a high level of control over their information, as it provides peace of mind, but these properties shouldn’t be too concerned that most users will fully take advantage of these controls.

Social networking sites and search engines are increasingly offering control to users. Wink.com, a people search engine, recently added a social networking component that enables users to control the information gathered about them. Whitepages.com recently announced a similar initiative that will enable people to add, correct, hide, and delete information about themselves starting next year.

The study did find one group who cares very much about what is known about them online. 10% of those they surveyed have jobs that require them to market themselves online. 68% of those with an “online persona” search for themselves.

Searching For Others More people have searched for others than for themselves. 53% of online adults have searched for family, friends, colleagues, or prospective dates, although only 7% do this regularly. 36% have looked for people from their past and 9% have searched for information on people they are dating. The most popular type of people search is for contact information (72%). This trend bodes well for the variety of new people search engines that have sprung up recently. Only 42% say that they get the results they are looking for at least most of the time, which means that these people search engines may be able to fill a gap left by traditional search engines.

Teen Vs. Adult Perspectives Only 20% of online adults have social networking profiles, compared to 55% of online teens, but teens are more likely to place restrictions around who can see their profiles. Is this because teens have more to hide or because adults don’t yet realize they should be hiding more?

Interestingly, 76% of teens feel that it would be at least somewhat difficult for someone to figure out who they are from their social networking profile. 54% of online users 18-29 feel that it would be difficult to searchers to locate or contact them based on online information generally.

Another interesting tidbit is that 8% of internet users ages 50-64 have social networking profiles, compared to 15% of internet users ages 20-49 and 50% of those 18-29.

Online Life and Professional Life Intersect Only 28% of online working adults feel that it’s “very important” not to be monitored online at work, down from 65% in 1994. And 20% of working Americans now have employers with policies around how employees present themselves online (such as by blogging).

As we become more visible online and more jobs require an online presence, the lines between personal and professional life continue to blur. Will that make internet users more concerned about how they are represented online? This survey seems to indicate just the opposite. As we get more comfortable with interacting and contributing online, we grow less worried about privacy and visibility. At least until those pics you thought you burned long ago somehow make it to Flickr.

Last week, I wrote about the overall people search landscape, which, while not new, has been recently expanding and making full use of all that is shiny Web 2.0. Spock is the latest of these services to leverage social networks, intelligent web crawling, and community involvement. Spock launched in private beta in April, then in public beta in August.

With Spock, you can search on a person’s name or a keyword that may be associated with a person, and are returned a list of people with associated tags, photos, and web sites. From there, you can drill into more information about any of those aspects, add information of your own, or browse to people who are related in various ways.

Spock CEO Jaideep Singh says that their crawling and indexing infrastructure has the unique ability to identify people-specific data on web pages and extract only this information. Their algorithms combine natural language processing with machine learning and they augment this with human involvement—both community input and editorial oversight.

Tagging provides a unique twist on the search for people. As Singh points out, your search can turn into a discovery. You may initially search for information on Kristen Dunst, but then might follow the tags to see others associated with Bring It On and notice that several of those listed are also tagged with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, including Christophe Beck, who choreographed the music for both the awesome cheerleading movie and the kick ass TV show about the blonde girl with the pointy stick. Click “related people” for a list from another perspective.

In the case of Kristen Dunst, this gives you mostly a list of ex-boyfriends rather than costars. You view people in a larger context and can gain more insight with this type of system. You can also search directly over tags. For instance, a search for “Buffy fan” returns, well among other people, me. Singh says that only half of people-related searches are for names and the rest are topical, so having a way to categorize people into a variety of topics can be very useful.

Anyone can add a tag to anyone else. Spock is confident that the ability of the community to vote on tags will bring a Digg-like democracy to the results and will present an accurate picture of not only how people view themselves, but how the web views them as well. Singh notes, for instance, that while Google created an algorithm to keep George Bush from being returned as a top result for “miserable failure”, that’s a relevant result for Spock because it reflects the views of the community. (It’s currently the second tag listed for Bush.)

But tagging has not been without criticism. A Digg-like democracy can give power to the collective people or it can be a ripe environment for gaming, and in typical web fashion, that has already begun. Singh claims the malicious use of tagging has been extremely low and notes that anyone can request removal of a tag once they’ve claimed their profile. And then there’s Spock Power, which gives more or less weight to votes based on a person’s history (how often contributions have been voted up or down). They also point to their transparency. Since everyone can see how everyone else tags and votes, I know exactly who’s tagging me as a Buffy fan.

Spock is incorporating other community aspects as well. Once you’ve created an account and claimed your profile, you can add friends and mark people as favorites. It seems that Spock marks favorites for you as well based on matches it finds from your connections on social networks such as LinkedIn. You can also import your address books and start building up a full network of contacts. You can add information to each profile that only you can see, such as phone numbers and notes. With features like this, you can see a bit of Spock’s roots as the ultimate contact management system (after the founders become frustrated with the limitations of Outlook). Since Spock can be a combination of contact information you add about people and the information that Spock finds about them from the web, you can potentially do more useful searches over those contacts. Rather than just search by name, you can look for all your contacts who like to play golf or are experts in link building.

Creating an account and registering your profile not only enables you to take part in the community aspects of the site, but it allows you to engage in a bit of reputation management as well. Information that you add about yourself is weighted more heavily than information others add about you. Also, you can sign up for alerts about when others add information to your profile.

How relevant are the results? Spock is going after quality over comprehensiveness and are slowly expanding. They don’t include offline data, but are ambitiously aiming to crawl the entire web and extract all useful people-related information. They’re not there yet. Flickr photos are visibly missing, for instance, but they’re working on adding more data sources over time.

Singh acknowledges that extraction and aggregation are hard problems. They feel they have an advantage over Google regarding extraction because while Google is agnostic to the page type, Spock tries to identify pages and information specifically about people and then processes over that. Aggregation requires that you not only can classify the data as people-related, but can identify when data from disparate locations is about the same person. So far, Spock seems to be primarily concentrating on grouping profiles from social networks and adding links from blogs, news stories, and sites like Wikipedia.

They feel their “man plus machine” philosophy is a scalable and effective way to combine smart approaches to algorithmic classifications with crowdsourcing. While this multi-faced approach seems promising, they certainly have an uphill battle. Can they engage the community to add valuable information? Can they become comprehensive—both in the total number of people they profile and in the information about each person? Can they introduce a paradigm shift around where people search and how people manage their contacts that will trigger a move away from Google and Outlook for people-related data? And maybe most importantly, will all of these plays give them an edge over the other people search services in the space?

All of that remains to be seen, but certainly they’ll be expanding in these areas over time, so they’re well worth watching. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for the rundown on some of the other services and their approaches to winning the battle of the people search vertical.

Vanessa Fox is product team lead for Zillow.com. She was product manager for Google Webmaster Central before joining Zillow in mid-2007.

Can you imagine trying to sort through billions of web pages without a search engine? Inconceivable! They make it easy and fast to find information. Now how about finding one of the six billion people on the planet. Where’s the Google of people search? As it turns out, an entire industry of people search engines is ramping up. In this series, I’ll be looking at the people search engines: existing ones that are revitalizing, brand new ones that have emerged and yes, whether or not Facebook will be the one to consume them all.

People search certainly isn’t new. As Michael Tanne, CEO of Wink, points out, in the days before mainstream transportation everyone knew everything about everyone else in a village. And if you didn’t know someone, all you had to do was ask around: low-tech but very effective people search. But the world got bigger and eventually came tools like white pages and public records. With the internet, this data was ported online and made more easily searchable. Internet communities that enabled people to create profiles populated with their interests added a whole new facet to people searching. The latest services take all of these elements and throw social networking, blogs, Wikipedia, Flickr, and the proverbial web 2.0 kitchen sink into the mix.

Talk to these companies, and you’ll hear terms like “semantic indexing”, “structured data”, and “social graph” tossed around. Nearly all of them attempt to provide some aggregation and organization to the plethora of social networks that exist every place you look and many employ social networking aspects of their own — from community tagging and voting to social connections and content generation. Looking at them, you might wonder if they bring order to the chaos or contribute to it. But they’ll tell you there’s a method to the madness, and their hope is to help you sort through the web and find everything you might want to know about any person out there.

You can also go straight to the social networking sites to search for people (even Twitter says it now does people search), but since those sites aren’t built to be search engines, it may be more difficult to find who you’re looking for, and of course, they will only return results for that single site. Facebook in particular has touted itself as a people search engine, but calling yourself such doesn’t make it so. Unlike many other social networking profiles, very little Facebook information is available to those not in the person’s network. At best, you can use a Facebook result to find friends you want to add to your network. It’s not ideal for mining data.

All this talk of Facebook opening up to search being a people search killer is so far just a lot of talk. In fact, their recent push to open up their data to search engines may benefit people search engines, who may now more easily add Facebook profiles to their data aggregation.

Todd Sawicki, who spent some time as VP of Marketing for Spock and is currently an advisor for Facebar, sees the people search landscape at a crossroads. “When people search companies started, the assumption was that they would help aggregate and distill the multiple identities people were creating online.  The goal was to create the complete view of you—likes, dislikes, background, friends, etc and since that information was spread around the net—aggregating that disparate information potentially provides a ton of value.

What none of the people search engines expected was Facebook.  In a social network like Facebook, users willingly handing over all the information that people search engines are trying to cull and aggregate.  Thus in a world where everyone is on Facebook, Facebook becomes the only place people need to go search for people.  Now, if everyone doesn’t flock to Facebook and other dominant profile-based networks emerge, then people search engines provide the important layer on top of those networks helping to connect the dots across them.”

While it’s true that Facebook apps enable users to aggregate much of their data from across the web (including blog posts, Twitters, and Flickr photos), only friends can view this data, which doesn’t make the results ideal for non-friendship searching. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said as much in a recent Wired article: People already have their friends, acquaintances, and business connections.” “So rather than building new connections, what we are doing is just mapping them out.” This is far different from what some of the people search engines are attempting to do. Not all people searches are about connecting with friends.

What about privacy? Do these sites encroach on privacy by making information about people easier to find? For the most part, people search services are just providing aggregation for what you and others have put online. Google and other search engines have been doing this for years. If you’re concerned about privacy, you should check out the policies of any social networks you use to see what information is available to those you haven’t explicitly opted-in to your friends network. LinkedIn, for instance, makes everything public unless you choose otherwise.

In some cases, these services also enable the community to add information about you. Spock, for instance, allows the community to add tags that describe you to your profile. But someone could almost as easily create a web page about you that others could find through Google, so even that’s not new. All have policies around removing information if you request it. ZoomInfo notes that people often use their service to find out where on the web they’re being discussed and use it as a list of sites to contact. They then request removal from ZoomInfo last.

So, what of people search, old and new, should you try out? I’ll be going through them all in this series, but in general, the service that might benefit you most depends on the type of searching that you’re doing.

Connecting with friends. If you’re looking for friends (old or new) or for background on that person you just met at the bar, you can get dirt—er, information—using any of the people search engines out there. Anyone without a strong web presence may be difficult to find, particularly since consolidation can be problematic (Spock and Wink seem to be doing the most in this area). You may need to do double check your findings with a major search engine or search social networks directly. 

Genealogy. The newer people search services may not be all that helpful, since they rely primarily on web data and generally don’t include offline information. For historical information, you’re better off with some of the more traditional people search services or a genealogy service. However, these newer services might give you lots of eye-opening data about your current relatives.

Research. Each people search engine has a particular niche within the vertical and not all types of research are created equal. Want to find all the RSS feeds for someone? Wink may be your best bet. Want a golf partner in Seattle who’s also a venture capitalist interested in investing in a new widget company like yours? You might check out Spock. Looking for a VP of Marketing who’s worked in both the biotech and telecommunications industries in Miami? ZoomInfo may be the search engine for you.

Spock’s CEO Jaideep Singh points out his engine’s component of discovery. If you’re looking for information on Tony Hawk, you might use the categorical tagging system to get a list of other skateboarders, and from there find out about Shaun White and the entire 2006 U.S. Olympic snowboarding team.

One caveat: These services are at various stages of beta, comprehensiveness, and quality, so relying on just one at this point might lead to less-than-ideal results.

Reputation Management. If you care about managing your online reputation, you should check out how all of these sites represent you. Most of the newest ones rely entirely on crawling the web and anything they find is fair game. These sites can sometimes rank fairly well in the mainstream search engines, not to mention that they are used independently for searches. You should definitely claim and fill out your profiles.

Search engine optimization. Since profiles from these services can rank fairly well, you may as well beef up your profiles and add links to your blogs and any other sites you own that you want to drive traffic to. And since many of these services allow for keyword searches, potential customers just may find your business from your profile. It’s hard to tell how much traffic these sites will be able to generate, since the adoption is still in early stages, but making sure your information is up-to-date and accurate surely can’t hurt.

Job and industry search. If you’re looking for a job, to fill positions, or for information on particular industries or companies, searches using these services might produce data that would be difficult to find in the noisier search results you might get from a major search engine, which returns information for various contexts.

LinkedIn is likely the most well-known site of this type, but some of the other services augment a LinkedIn search in that they provide not only user-provided data, but also data found from crawling the web. You may still use LinkedIn (or these days, possibly Facebook) to make the connection, but you might do the initial research elsewhere. As Wink’s CEO explains, you can get a richer context for the person before you make the connection.

What’s next? Look for these services to become more comprehensive and improve in both aggregation and relevancy, at least in part by leveraging community involvement. New services are likely to pop up that have foundational elements of the semantic web or natural language processing, and that attempt to solve the problems of disconnected social networks. I’ll explore how the old and new school people search engines are doing in these areas in upcoming articles in this series.

Vanessa Fox is product team lead for Zillow.com. She was product manager for Google Webmaster Central before joining Zillow in mid-2007.

Last week, Facebook formally announced that it was making millions of personal profiles accessible to the public via major search engines. As far as I can tell, Facebook members who never intended or expected to be listed this way were suddenly opted-in to Facebook’s new plan. I say "as far as I can tell" because despite several attempts over the past week, Facebook has failed to provide me with any official answers. Below, some of the key questions I put to the service about the profile move and member privacy issues, along with answers as best I can determine on my own.

To reduce the hype factor, practically no private data is being released. Instead, it’s the shift to an opt-out model that I find the real story here. And for more background on the new profile listings, be sure to read my Facebook Opens Profiles To Tap Into Google Traffic article from last week.

1) Are The "Public Search Listings" New, As Facebook Claims?

No.

To explain more, last week on Sept. 5, Facebook blogged about the new public search listings:

Starting today, we are making limited public search listings available to people who are not logged in to Facebook.

That makes the listings seem like something brand new. But they aren’t. My aforementioned Facebook Opens Profiles To Tap Into Google Traffic article documented how Tom Critchlow found he had a public search listing back in July — and one that was showing up in Google. Rae "Sugarrae" Hoffman is an experienced Facebook user who also found that her profile was available and in search engines ages ago.

Why care if the listings aren’t new but just being spun that way? Because many people were not aware that these profiles were already being offered and, importantly, might not have wanted them to be found by search engines. That leads to the next question.

2) Was The Default Privacy Setting Changed To Expose These Listings?

Maybe.

I can’t say definitely, because only Facebook knows how things were (or someone who documented how things were before the announcement was made). However, there are enough clues (including Facebook’s silence on this issue) to suggest that the default settings were either shifted to expose public listings for everyone or the feature, whenever it was enabled, exposed the listings from the outset.

To explain more, via the Privacy Overview page, you can reach the Privacy Settings For Search page. That has a section which looks like this:

See how you can choose to show anyone, including search engines, your public search listing? This is the control panel that Facebook has suggested was a new addition. In reality, the control panel existed several weeks before last week’s announcement.

The screenshot above shows the current default settings. IE, if you sign-up for Facebook right now, the privacy settings are set to expose your public search listing to anyone, including search engines.

How things were matters. If things were set not to expose listings, then Facebook has suddenly opted-in millions of people. If settings always exposed these listings, then Facebook is "coming clean" late in the game. More on both, below.

3) If Privacy Settings Disabled Public Search Listings, Were These Flipped Back To Expose?

Probably not.

Let me go back the three states that the public search listing control panel could have had and the implication of each state.

Expose: This is the current default, where public search listings are created and shown to search engines. I suspect this has always been the default. At some point well prior to last week’s announcement, Facebook created these public search listing pages and added a control panel for users to handle them. Both are known facts. I think the defaults in the control panel were always set to expose these pages, effectively opting-in Facebook members to having their names put into search engines.

If that’s the case, it’s disturbing that weeks later, Facebook finally decides it needs to tell members about this "new" feature. That announcement should have been made when the feature was launched, it seems.

Don’t Expose: It may have been that the settings for members were set to NOT expose these listings, by default. If that was the case (again, we don’t know, as Facebook isn’t saying), members are now being opted-in to having their pages exposed.

From a statement Facebook gave the press last week: "We are giving users approximately one month to set their privacy options before we allow search engines to index these public search listings." If the settings were already set to don’t expose, then users shouldn’t need to set any privacy options unless Facebook is now changing the previous defaults.

Customized: We don’t know if the defaults were set to expose or not, in the past. We do know, however, that some users will likely have found the control panel and customized it one way or the other. What happens if the defaults were set to expose and changed — by the user — to not expose these pages? Does last week’s announcement mean that Facebook will reset the member customization?

I suspect not, and last week’s Facebook blog post did say listings would be exposed "depending on users’ individual privacy settings," which implies they aren’t going to override any customization. But it’s not entirely clear.

4) How Will The Listings Get Into Search Engines?

Unknown.

To be clear, some of these listings are already in search engines despite Facebook is making it seem like this hasn’t happened yet. The statement above talked about a month time period before search engines were allowed to index the listings. The blog post also suggested that search engines wouldn’t be allowed to get these pages for a few weeks. However, some are already out there.

Again, my Facebook Opens Profiles To Tap Into Google Traffic has some screenshots that explain this, or you can try some searches like this and this and this to see more than 25,000 pages in Google (perhaps 60,000 at Ask; 5,000 at Microsoft Live Search and 12,000 at Yahoo).

Of course, Facebook has over 30 million of members, and virtually none of them have listings that have been indexed by the search engines yet. That’s because just creating the public listings doesn’t mean search engines will find them. Those listed already probably manually exposed links to their listings (my past article gets into this more). But in a few weeks, it seems like Facebook itself will put the links out there.

Facebook has two choices here and will likely do both:

• Member Directory: Chances are, Facebook will provide a way to browse through and find all the members on the site (showing only the limited public listings for members, to those not logged in). It will likely be similar to how you can currently browse networks.
   
• XML Sitemaps: Sitemaps are a way to bulk feed search engines listings. Chances are, Facebook will also feed URLs to the major search engines in addition to making pages crawlable.

Bonus Round: Listed Even If You Say No

That’s it for the questions. I also thought it useful to look at keeping these pages out of the search engines, if you don’t want them listed. Unfortunately, just ticking the "don’t show" option at Facebook won’t be enough.

See, the problem is that if search engines see ANY link pointing at a page, they may list the page even if it is blocked from being spidered. For example, consider this:

That’s an example of how my PRIVATE listing at Facebook shows up on Google already. This is a listing that Facebook is never going to expose to the search engines. But because Google can see a link to it (probably via my Sphinn profile page), it will list the URL and guess about what words to call it in the title.

URLs like these are called "thin" or "partially indexed "by the search engines, and these two articles from me explain more about how they work:

• Google Releases Improved Content Removal Tools
• Google Checkout’s Title Goes Missing On Google

I prefer calling these URL-only listings — and the public listings that Facebook will provide may show up as at URL-only listings even if you think they aren’t supposed to be in the search engines at all. That’s because if there’s even one link pointing at these pages, that can be enough to cause a URL-only listing to be formed. Since Facebook’s going to be supplying links, there’s a good chance many URL-only listings will happen.

What would they show? For me, if I were to block my profile, probably something like this:

danny sullivan
www.facebook.com/p/Danny_Sullivan/684476602

As you can see, all you really get from that type of listing is the name of someone who has a profile at Facebook. Anyone can make an account in anyone else’s name, so it doesn’t even indicate that a particular person has this profile. However, it might give some a clue you are on Facebook, especially if you have a distinctive and unusual name. The main takeaway is really that just because you untick the "expose" boxes in the privacy settings does NOT mean you won’t be listed in search engines. It simply means less information will be shown.

Getting Rid Of URL-Only Listings

Remember, the public search listings that Facebook is providing shows practically nothing already. Here’s mine:

You’ve got my name, picture and the fact that I’m on Facebook.

If I disable exposing this, then a URL-only listing — if it happens — gives you the same without the picture. But as I said, maybe even that’s too much for some people. How do you get rid of the URL-only listing?

First, you have to understand how Facebook itself tries to block them. If you set the privacy option to not expose these, Facebook inserts this meta robots tag on your page:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow,noarchive,nosnippet,noydir,noodp"/>

If you want to understand all those commands more, see my Meta Robots Tag 101: Blocking Spiders, Cached Pages & More article. The key one is "noindex," which says don’t spider this page.

For Google, noindex will also prevent a URL-only listing from happening. For Yahoo, it will NOT, according to Yahoo. The only way to remove a URL-only listing from Yahoo is through the Yahoo Site Explorer’s Delete URL feature, and that won’t work with Facebook. Delete URL only works for web sites you can verify having control over. You cannot verify Facebook for yourself!

I don’t know how Microsoft or Ask will react — I’ll check and postscript.

Poking At Facebook’s SEO

As I looked into the blocking issue, I also noticed the other meta tags that Facebook is using. On pages that are NOT blocked, it uses the same meta description tag for each of them:

<meta name="description" content="Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet." />

It’s kind of silly — a meta description tag should uniquely describe the content of a particular page, and using the same description on millions of pages could potentially make them seem duplicates of each other for either indexing or display purposes. In reality, most of these pages will come up in response to a search on someone’s name — and since the name isn’t in the meta description tag, that tag probably won’t be used as the description shown. But Facebook could make these descriptions appear and be far more relevant if it reworked them to incorporate the person’s name and explained this was their public listing on Facebook.

Conclusion

Still with me? Here’s the recap:

• Facebook has been offering public listings well before last week’s announcement.
   
• These listings have been exposed to search engines before members got a heads-up about it last week.
   
• Millions of Facebook members have to opt-out of the exposure, if they don’t want it (and may have assumed they were already "private").
   
• Facebook will be feeding these URLs to the search engines.
   
• Exposure of the URLs means that even if you opt-out, you might find you get a URL-only listing showing up at Yahoo and maybe Microsoft Live.com and Ask.com.

Google is getting a bit more like Facebook by enabling a Facebook-style news feed within its Orkut social networking site, while the king of the walled gardens Facebook acknowledges in actions (rather than words) that it really can’t go it alone without search engines like Google, as it prepares to let crawlers into its public user profiles. Actually, Facebook is telling its users that existing profiles already accessible to search engines will be exposed even more. Below, more on the moves, with lots of screenshots and explanations.

Facebook Says Public Listings To Be Made Crawlable

Public Search Listings on Facebook from the Facebook Blog covers how as of today, some limited user profile information — what Facebook calls a "Public Search Listing" — is being made available to anyone who comes to Facebook, regardless of whether they are logged in. This will include search engine spiders, as well. That means these listings should start showing up in Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live and so on. From the post:

Starting today, we are making limited public search listings available to people who are not logged in to Facebook. We’re expanding search so that people can see which of their friends are on Facebook more easily. The public search listing contains less information than someone could find right after signing up anyway, so we’re not exposing any new information, and you have complete control over your public search listing.

In a few weeks, we will allow these Public Search listings (depending on users’ individual privacy settings) to be found by search engines like Google, MSN Live, Yahoo, etc. We think this will help more people connect and find value from Facebook without exposing any actual profile information or data.

Um — This Isn’t New!

I found the news confusing for many reasons. For one, I remember signing-up for Facebook before this announcement and seeing an area within the privacy settings allowing me to expose my profile to search engines or not, if I wanted. So this is new, as Facebook claims today? I don’t think so.

Indeed, Tom Critchlow at Distilled wrote about these options being live back in July. By the end of the month, by linking to his public listing using his name as the anchor text, he found that listing at Facebook ranking well within Google. Then by early this month, it was no longer ranking. He pondered whether Google was penalizing Facebook listings.

Well, the listing is still there in the index, as you can see here when doing a very specific search:

It’s just no longer ranking tops for his name, tom critchlow, as it was.

Back to that Facebook post. Remember how they said "in a few weeks" that these public listings would be allowed into public search engines? The fact that Tom’s in there now further underscores that this isn’t new. Moreover, look at what happens when you go to Tom’s public listing via Google:

See how it says "You are seeing this because you clicked on a public search listing link from a search engine or other external site." There’s already the expectation from Facebook that these listings will be in search engines or already are in them, rather than this being something that will happen within a few weeks.

FYI, that screen above is what you see if you’re logged in. You get a slightly different message if you’re not:

Facebook Probably Moving To Opt-Out On Profile Exposure

So what’s going on? I’ll follow up with Facebook, but I think the real situation is this:

• The public listings and settings to expose them to search engines have been in place for at least several weeks. They are not new out today.
   
• By default, I think these have been set to off, not to expose the listings.
   
• Today’s announcement is probably an heads-up that the default is being changed to on for all Facebook users without actually explicitly saying that.
   
• Most of these public listings are probably not in the search engines yet, since most people probably haven’t found or linked to their public profiles.
   
• Today’s announcement is also news that Facebook is going to do some SEO work to ensure search engines find these profiles.

I’m checking with Facebook further on these points and will update when I hear back.

Where IS My Public Listing?

Let me use myself as an example to explain things more. If you asked me for my profile on Facebook, I’d say it’s here. And that profile is listed in Google, if you do a narrow search like this:

See how there’s not the usual description? Nor is there a cached link? That’s a sign that this is a "partially indexed" URL at Google, a page it only knows about by seeing links to it, not by actually having crawled it (see Google Releases Improved Content Removal Tools and Google Checkout’s Title Goes Missing On Google for more about these types of URLs).

What’s happened is that Google has found a link to my Facebook profile from somewhere (probably via my Sphinn profile page), tried to spider the Facebook page but wasn’t allowed in. So, it uses the anchor text title from that page (which is "Danny Sullivan") as the title of the page (and puts it into lowercase because of a bug/feature that the company continues to fail to fix).

But what about my so-called "public search listing." Well, that’s hard to locate. For example, when I went into Facebook today, I got a big notice at the top telling me I had one:

The problem is, I can’t "check out" my public listing as Facebook encourages me beyond looking at it in that notice because they gave me no link to it. Where’s it live?

If I go to my search privacy settings, there is a link that says "view my public search listing" next to the controls:

Clicking on that link doesn’t take me to the page. Instead, I get a pop-up showing me what it looks like, again with NO link to the page itself:

As you can see, I’ve probably had a public listing for weeks, just like Tom and perhaps other Facebookers. But I’ve never linked to it as I didn’t know where it was located. After even more hunting today, I still don’t see a link to it. Maybe I’m completely dumb, but that darn link isn’t noticeable.

To find it, I went back to Tom’s public listing. The URL looks like this:

http://www.facebook.com/p/Tom_Critchlow/633955149

OK, the /p/ part probably means that these are public listings, and his name is pretty obvious. As for the number, all Facebook private profiles have a number. So, I should be able to hack together my own URL, as long as I know my name (I do!) and my number (I do!):

http://facebook.com/p/Danny_Sullivan/684476602

And there I am. Danny Sullivan on Facebook:

Pros & Cons To Public Listing

Now that I’ve linked to my profile, it will get indexed by the search engines. Perhaps it might even start to rank well. Personally, I don’t mind this. Indeed, many people are discovering how social media sites can help them better control reputation management as a means of dominating the top results for their names (see 3 Ways Social Media Marketing Helps SEO for more about this).

If I did care, I could use that privacy setting to keep it out of the search engines — though that still won’t prevent a "partially indexed" URL from showing up. If search engines see even one link to these pages, you might end up with a listing. Again, Google Releases Improved Content Removal Tools not only explains the concept more, but it also covers the extra steps you need to take to get rid of these listings — though this generally will only work if the third party hosting service has physically removed the page or put up a robots.txt or meta robots block).

New Traffic For Facebook

Having my profile out there is good news for Facebook, because it will send some traffic their way. Indeed, some people search engines have long employed this tactic of tapping into name searches on other search engines to boost their business model.

Of course, it doesn’t help Facebook much if only a few people figure out how to hack up a URL linking to their public pages. That’s why my other points are important — Facebook will probably move to a default of "on" for exposing these pages (the more pages out there, the more traffic it can gather), plus it will probably set up a means for the search engines to find them (such as submitting sitemaps or making it possible for search engines to crawl further into the site from place like the network page to personal profiles).

This is a basic feature of SEO — you make your content crawlable to the search engines. But more important, Facebook has come under accusations of trying to build a walled garden, where everything happens from within Facebook rather than on the open web (Grokking Facebook: AOL 2.0 has a bit more of my thoughts on this). Some have even viewed Facebook as not needing Google or "external" services, since it has such a compelling network and hive of activity internally.

Facebook: Loving SEO & Google

Guess not. Facebook clearly needs and wants that external exposure, or it wouldn’t be making this move. Indeed, it’s even more ironic that only two months ago, Facebook talked about being the most used people search engine on the web. My Facebook One Of The Top Search Engines? I Dunno About That! post looks at this more with some skepticism. That now grows when by putting profiles out into Google and other major search engines, Facebook acknowledges that it is far from the only place people are looking for other people.

So Facebook needs Google, or at least its traffic. But what about all that noise recently about Google needing Facebook. Skip past the chatter regarding the social graph improving search. Last month, Google vice president of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer talked with me about being intrigued by Facebook and wanting to do some of the things that Facebook does, not to mention saying it was her favorite non-Google service (see here and here and here).

Of course, Google has its own long-standing social network, Orkut. Even I will joke along with others about it seeming to be big in Brazil, Iran and nowhere else. But in another interview recently (read here; listen here), Mayer fairly points out that it is the second largest social network world wide.

Google: Nice Idea Facebook, Can We Have A News Feed For Orkut?

That leads us to Google borrowing from Facebook. One of Facebook’s most compelling features is the news feed, a terrible name for those who think "news feed" means an RSS feed you subscribe to. "Friend Feed" would be a better name, since the news feed is a running update of what your friends are doing on Facebook, like this:

Now Orkut is getting its own friend feed, as explained on the Orkut blog:

Starting today you may see a "Updates from your friends" box on the homepage where you’ll get real-time updates when your friend Divya has a new address, when Priya has uploaded a new favorite YouTube video, or Amar has posted his new photos. Any changes you make will show up on your friends’ homepages as well, so they can be the first to wish you best of luck at your new job, or or send you a scrap about the photo from your latest vacation.

I checked my Orkut profile and don’t see it live there yet, so can’t show you an example. Orkut says it will be coming out for various users over the next few days.

Postscript: Techmeme has more discussion here, and Amit Agarwal points out you can see that more than 25,000 public listings are already in Facebook.

Postscript 2: John Battelle also seems to have gotten a FAQ from the PR department that says, "In addition, we are informing all users that external indexing will occur in approximately one month, so they have time to adjust their privacy settings." Oops — plenty of users are already indexed, of course – though the privacy settings they chose should have initially told them this would happen. Those are the settings that are supposedly new out now but have actually been in place for some time.

Postscript 3: 4 Questions & Answers You Should Know About Facebook’s Public Search Listings goes into more depth about how these listings will be distributed to search engines plus how most members were effectively opted-in to them well before the Facebook announcement