I’ve never been happy with people search engines. They just are not deep enough, and if they were, I supposed I’d be unhappy for another reason – our society is not ready for that level of access/transparency. In any case, Web Worker Daily seems to agree that most people search engines are, well, not so great. They put a bunch through some testing here.
People Search
I've never been happy with people search engines. They just are not deep enough, and if they were, I supposed I'd be unhappy for another reason – our society is not ready for that level of access/transparency. In any case, Web Worker Daily seems to agree that most people…
I think people search is building for sub-optimal use. When I think of what I want from people search it’s either to define someone I’m thinking of meeting or to introduce me to people I’d like to meet.
For the first goal I’d like to read a self definition from that person, Google does a good enough job of aggregating external opinion that I don’t see the need to go to another site.
For the introductions I want to give a set of criteria and have the system deliver all the people that meet that selection. The problem is most of this data lives in varying places, not necessarily tied to the user, usually in a closed system by default. However Facebook is beginning to be a force in this way. We are not to far from being able to search for anyone living in San Francisco, who read The Search and rated it above a certain rank, went to MIT for Computer Science and uses the word entrepreneurial in describing themselves. Boom, I have a short list of CTO candidates to vet.
I’m not saying that search would give you the best CTO. You’d have to apply some common sense to how broad or narrow you search, but the cross sections you could come up with are fascinating.
Did you mean http://www.eecs.mit.edu/ OR http://www.csail.mit.edu/ OR maybe http://www.media.mit.edu/ OR http://www-math.mit.edu/research/theoretical-cs.html (and/or perhaps I am overlooking a dozen other such departments)?