123People is a brand new people search engine that is set to launch this week. It finds and identifies information from hundreds of publicly available sources on the web in real-time, to produce up-to-date results including from social network profiles, web links, email address, images and videos.

The search results contain a vast amount of information, including:

• Popular social media profiles (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Xing, Friendster, HiFive, FlickR, Bebo,Bloglines, Blogger, takkle, zoominfo and LastFM)
• Instant Messenger profiles and Microblogs such as AIM and twitter
• Tagclouds
• Biographies
• Phone numbers and emails
• News pages results

It is a good idea to gather people information across services like this — a metasearch engine for people information from the Social Web, if you will. But this is a competitive niche. Has 123People got what it takes?

You can already choose from services like PeekYou, ZoomInfo and Wink. 123People has a distinct flavor and could compete given time, but there is room for improvement.

123 people is in beta with improvements being made over the next week in time for the US public launch 16th October 2008. Here are some of the changes I’d like to see:

Limiting a search

On the 123People home page you can choose to search the world or to limit your search to Austria, Germany, Switzerland or the United States (123People is an Austrian company with a special interest in the German speaking world).

This list needs to grow considerably to be really useful and this is an important feature for improving search results. Searching for my own name (Susanne Koch) I get hits from Denmark, Germany, Norway and the United States all mixed on one page, which is not very useful (perhaps with the exception of genealogy search).

It would also be useful to have a box to search for username. I tried searching 123People for info related to usernames and it works. All the more reason to add this option to the front page.

Presenting the search results

123People search a lot of sources and include many categories of information in their search results. This could be useful. But all this information makes the search results page feel crammed and it can be overwhelming to navigate.

There are no less than 14 categories of content on the results page, each in a separate box. And search box has several tabs: The default view shows all hits in a category (e.g. social networks) while the tabs let you choose to view results from a single network like LinkedIn or Facebook. The tabs make it easy to sort through a box, which is good.

I miss the option to exclude certain information from the results and I would like to be able to close the boxes I don’t need.

You can use the tag cloud to narrow your search: You do a search for a person, scan the search results and then click one or more terms in the tag cloud provided by 123People. This narrows the search and can serve to show the relationship of a person to certain topics. For advanced users, this is an interesting tool, for others, it might be confusing.

Sink or swim?
At the moment, 123People is an interesting and useful tool if the person you are searching for has a unique or at least very unusual name. Otherwise, there is just too much info across too many axis to make sense for the average web searcher.

Once they figure out a way to deal with this, this could prove to be a useful research tool.