Should Google Have a “People Search”?

I was just reading Aarons comment on my last post and it got me thinking. First, in case you missed it, here is what he said:

while Google makes it pretty easy to find someone, I think the search engines are going to get even better at this. They’re going to have to with millions of people starting their own sites on domains that don’t sync up with their real names.

Why hasn’t Google already done more in this area?

Search Google for my name right now and you get the usual mix of sites and personas.

Anyone who has been on the web for a while will probably also have a mixture of various profiles, their own blog, perhaps their employer, etc. What you do not see is my Facebook, LinkedIn, etc profile. While those services are, at least in part, meant to be “people discovery systems”, I have no motivation to send them “search juice” by linking to them.

Google sates as their mission:

to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

I think having a useful interface for finding people online would not only be cool, but incredibly useful. While others have attempted this in the past, Google could actually do it.

Yes, they have a phone book, and Yahoo! has their equivalent, but those are hardly what I am wanting, and not particularly useful for the majority of the world either.

I can see it being a tab, like “Images”, to differentiate between trying to find the person/profile/site of versus places that mention the phrase “Chris Garrett”. Multiple results could be listed showing either profile photograph or website snapshot along with whatever contact or bio details they can find.

What do you think?

Posted on December 18, 2007 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Google

Comments

9 Responses to “Should Google Have a “People Search”?”

  1. Brittney on December 18th, 2007 2:29 pm

    Hi,

    You have a very cool blog here…loved the content.
    You know there is an awesome concept I have come across through which you can access Linkedin on your mobile via sms & email without internet, GPRS or EDGE. Linkedin can be accessed anywhere anytime on almost any phone.
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  2. sir jorge on December 18th, 2007 9:48 pm

    i don’t want people googling me…at least not by that method

  3. Chris Garrett on December 18th, 2007 10:29 pm

    People Google other people all the time, why would this method be any worse?

  4. Adam Snider on December 18th, 2007 10:35 pm

    Something like a “Google People Search” could be cool. While Google usually gives me a lot of good results when I’m looking for people, I find that it does have a tendency to not show results for social networks, which often have the most information about people.

    I find Pipl works pretty good for finding the information that Google has a tendency to miss or ignore.

  5. Peter Cobcroft on December 18th, 2007 11:06 pm

    The National Library of Australia is looking into this currently – creating “People Australia” which will be an authority database for this kind of purpose. Mind you – it is more useful to librarians as it will be a database of signficant people.

  6. Chris Garrett on December 19th, 2007 2:05 am

    @Adam – Yes, I was thinking they could get people feeds just like they have sitemap import

    @Peter – Interesting stuff :)

  7. Aaron Stroud on December 20th, 2007 10:49 pm

    My guess would be that googling people works well enough for now and that the activity isn’t commonplace enough to devote resources to it.

    Aside from people who live and/or work online, googling people isn’t a day to day activity. As more of us work from home or online all day, they’ll get around to it.

    @Adam, thanks for the heads up about Pipl.

  8. Google People on April 16th, 2009 9:10 pm

    Adam is correct, a google people search option that draws from the larger web 2.0 properties would greatly enhance this search.

  9. Steve Public on July 7th, 2010 12:19 am

    As a person who’s been in the people search industry for over 2 years, I think that such feature isn’t necessary. Why? Because Google already does a pretty good job at integrating a ‘people search engine’ into their existing web search engine. I believe they’ve already done this job, when you search for a particular person on Google, first you see Facebook profiles and so on and then general information.

    However, some day Google might add a people search engine with some ‘extra’ features.

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