An easy to use but powerful web tool (it’s also free) named PolitickerUSA can save you a lot of time and effort informing you as to what members of congress are tweeting about right now.

In one location you can quickly access the non-stop real-time stream of tweets from Senators, Reps, President Obama, governors, and a few of the republican presidential candidates.

You can also filter the entire PolitickerUSA stream of tweets using a hashtag or word into the filter box. You do not have to click <enter>.

But Wait, There’s More

Here are a few other things you can do with PolitickerUSA.

1. Clicking any word or hashtag in a word cloud will run a search on Twitter for that hashatag or word.

2. Politician Trends allows you to quickly isolate and visualize the latest tweets from a specific politician.

3. A table of all politicians accessible using PolitickerUSA is available linking to their Twitter stream and providing their handle.

Kudos to the PolitickerUSA developer Brian for making the site available. You can read more about how he built the site here.

Topsy, the Twitter-focused real-time search engine, has launched a new tool aimed at helping users find the right people to follow called Topsy Expert Search. The blog post seems to suggest that this is a “labs” product, but there’s a prominent link to Expert Search right from Topsy’s home page.

Either way, Expert Search seems like a tool that’s not quite ready for prime-time. Consider, for example, an expert search for SEO:

(click for larger version)

No disrespect to the account holders who are listed for that query — they very well may be SEO experts. But I think most readers would agree that those are not the first Twitter users we’d think of when naming SEO experts. No @aaronwall? No @graywolf? No @randfish or @dannysullivan?

The Topsy blog post says that results are ranked “based on influence and topical focus,” but it seems that may be measured by how often you mention certain words in your tweets and how often you get retweeted. In fact, @hostdesign — the second-listed expert above — currently only has two tweets and 36 followers. It looks like the account had much more activity in the past, including many tweets that mentioned “SEO” repeatedly.

Topsy Expert Search does seem to fare a little better with more mainstream queries like nba, for example; it only does okay for U2, though.

The idea of doing a Twitter-based “expert search” is a good one, but for now you may want to rely on Twitter’s new usernames-in-search-results feature. You might also try Google’s experimental Follow Finder that I wrote about in April. And a month before that, I went deeper into several tools for this purpose in the article, How To Find The Right People To Follow On Twitter.

The company goes directly after Google in its press release and a related video introducing local business search:

For example, if someone was using Google to look up contact information for Target in the Seattle area, more than 6,000 results will be returned. Of those 6,000 results, only four of the first ten results are for an actual Target store — with Target Training, Trend Target and Target Darts appearing in the results. With the new WhitePages Store Locator, relevant and accurate contact information for 16 specific neighborhood Target stores in Seattle appear with the most relevant contact information being on top.

Unlike traditional search engines, WhitePages has built its extensive back-end database of business listings from the ground up to not only capture the most accurate local information, but to surface it in a way that makes it easy for consumers to locate and connect with businesses all in one place.

Many people don’t realize how successful WhitePages is; it’s something of a cash cow and has been profitable since its inception. The company took no VC money and is privately held. The company also powers “2 billion searches on over 1,500 partner sites.” It’s also a top 50 comScore website. And its mobile apps have done extremely well too.

In one sense WhitePages is an example of doing a narrow range of things extremely well. People use the site today chiefly to do name, address and phone lookups for individuals and businesses. Business search on WhitePages.com used to be provided by yellow pages publishers, which are still delivering ads to the site.

The company has recently enhanced and improved its search functionality and some of the features around its listings data. But the “marquee” feature being promoted with the new local business search launch is a store locator.

There is save, share and “get directions” functionality around each of these listings as well as store hours. However there’s limited “depth” to the content.

Along those lines I asked whether WhitePages was going to further enhance the types of content that it shows with the basic listings information. CEO Alex Algard emphasized that right now, on the business search side, the most common use case is a “name in mind” search. However he added that over time the company does plan to further enhance content, especially in selected verticals.

Mobile is also an area where WhitePages may do more interesting things. Right now the company offers iPhone, Android and BlackBerry apps. But there are a range of other ideas in the works.

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

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.