Searching for People

I am sure you have tried to do a search for a person online. If you are successful depends on a number of things. One is the name you are looking for. If the name is unusual, its usually not too hard to find. If its a 'smith', or if its shared with anyone who is a celebrity anywhere, its a lot tougher. One niche market that is being explored are name search engines that look at social networking sites to such as Facebook and Myspace to find names. An article on the emerging phenomenon in the current BusinessWeek with some sample sites. This week, one of the people searching sites: Spock.com (Beta) was launched. I explored a bit. It gave some interesting, but I would say incomplete results. A search on Google gave more complete results. It also seems to be gumming up its tagging capability with celebrity mentions, which is precisely what I do not want. I want to see real people. Also had some serious systems problems, likely due to startup conditions.