Spokeo – check it out

 

A friend in the Indianapolis BMW Club called my attention to a new people search engine that turns out to be fun to play with, but isn’t especially accurate.

It’s called Spokeo and its creators describe it thus:

Spokeo is a search engine specialized in organizing people-related information from phone books, social networks, marketing lists, business sites, and other public sources. Most of this data is publicly available on the Web.  For example, you can find people’s name, phone, and address on Whitepages.com, and you can get home values from Zillow.com.  That said, only Spokeo’s algorithm can piece together the scattered data into coherent people profiles, giving you the most comprehensive intelligence about anyone you want to find.

Spokeo’s innovative technology has received numerous accolades and reviews from Newsweek, WSJ, PCWorld, and more. Millions of people have already used Spokeo to connect with their family members, old friends, and business contacts. Try and see what Spokeo can find about you today!

A DIFFERENT TECHNOLOGY

Spokeo is different because it indexes information that no other search engine does. Spokeo aggregates data from hundreds of online and offline sources, including but not limited to: phone directories, social networks, marketing surveys, mailing lists, government census, real estate listings, and business websites. All data is publicly available, so anyone can access them from their respective sources. However, putting all the data pieces together would take you months. Spokeo automates the data aggregation for you and makes it FREE.

Traditional data companies have been quietly gathering people’s data for years, but they charge about $50 per report. Spokeo’s technology reduces the data acquisition costs and gives you the same powerful intelligence for FREE. By tearing down the price barrier, Spokeo revolutionizes the way people connect with each other.

SPOKEO VS. GOOGLE VS. FACEBOOK

How is Spokeo better than Googling someone? Google is the leader in organizing vast amounts of information from web pages, whereas Spokeo is a specialized tool for finding people-related data on social networks, phone books, marketing surveys, and more. By searching beyond the Web, Spokeo yields much more comprehensive and targeted results than general-purpose search engines for people-related queries.

How is Spokeo different from Facebook?  Facebook is a social network on which users shares their personal data, whereas Spokeo is a search engine that aggregates data from various third-party sources.  The difference between Facebook and Spokeo is analogous to the difference between You vs. Google Map taking a picture of your house. Data originated from you can be more detailed and accurate, but you also have the liberty to lie about it.  Data pieced from public domains may not be complete, but it gives an objective, third-party perspective, which is valuable for people research purposes.

LIMITATIONS

Spokeo showcases the power of information aggregation, but machine aggregation has its limits.  First of all, Spokeo data is only as good as the original source.  Since there is no human involved, the data is not verified and might not be accurate.  Moreover, many sources do not refresh their data often, so Spokeo data might not be up-to-date as well.  Spokeo will continue to work on new algorithms to improve its data accuracy.

Spokeo currently aggregates only US name and phone listings, so you cannot find non-US people by name or phone.  Spokeo’s email search uses a different technology, and it can find anyone in the world as long as they have social network accounts.

THE HISTORY

The concept of Spokeo started in 2005. As a Stanford student, Harrison liked to jump around different social networks.  At that time, most of his friends had profiles on MySpace, some blogged on Xanga, and his dormmates were constantly sharing YouTube videos. Harrison was having trouble keeping up, so he rounded his college friends together to build a so-called social network aggregator. Working out of Harrison’s parents’ basement, Harrison and his friends publicly launched this pioneering concept on Techcrunch in late 2006.

While the social network aggregation concept was indeed novel, users were having a hard time identifying their friends’ accounts on various social networks. With this realization, Spokeo then set out to build a search technology to automatically detect online identities associated with emails and URLs. In late 2007 Spokeo was refocused on automated people search and relaunched on TechCrunch.

Today, Spokeo’s technology has expanded beyond the original social networks concept to include phone books, marketing surveys, business databases, ecommerce stores, and other public databases. Spokeo’s mission is to organize the world’s people-related data, and it will continue to integrate additional types of data to better connect people.

So how good is it? I entered my name and found there are 108 guys in the U.S. with my first and last names. The geographic display made it easy to find myself in Arkansas and eliminate the 107 others.

Spokeo got my mailing address right, but has me in my late 60s (ahem, not yet), says I’m single (wrong), has my astrological birthsign and education wrong, says I’ve lived here seven years longer than I have, estimates my home value at $1 million plus (I wish), but says the neighborhood is “below average.” In the photo section, one of the two photos actually is me.

It says I have children, run a home business (kinda), am self-driven (I suppose. Nobody else drives me.), have elderly parents (both are deceased), am a collector (yes) and am not interested in politics (How in hell could they get that one so wrong?).

Also my house was not built in 1984, we do have central heating and AC and there are not 4-5 people in the household.

It found my son Steve but it clueless about my son Sean, even though Google finds a ton of stuff on him.

If I want more details (which may or may not be right) I can pay to be a Spokeo member. The choices are $2.95 a month for a one-year membership which gets me a full report and a year of searches, $3.95 a month for a six-month membership, a full report and six months of searches, or $4.95 a month for a three-month membership, a full report and three months of searches.

I’m keeping my credit card in my wallet for the time being.