Finding People and Invites Is Easier With These Tools

There has been quite a lot of positive press on the web about a new people specific search engine called Spock. When it first came out I initially had an inclination to try it out but immediately discovered it was a private beta and only available through invitation only. Since I am kind of a slow adopter I just made a mental note that I would try it someday. I didn’t particularly think it was worth the effort to bother going through the hassle of looking for an invite. But just the other day on TechCrunch I read an interesting post about how you could get an invite to any private beta from a web site called InviteShare. So I decided to give it a try and signed up. I browsed the list of web sites currently in private beta that InviteShare is currently sharing invites for and decided to see if I could snag an invite to Spock. It didn’t take very long for me to eventually receive an invitation to use Spock. I didn’t think it could be that easy. From this positive experience I can say InviteShare is a great idea and it definitely makes it easier for individuals to share invites with others who are really interested and want to try out private betas. If you are interested in private beta invites this is a site you should check out.

Now to look at Spock. Spock bills itself as the online leader in personal search and boasts having over one hundred million people already indexed. That is definitely an impressive number and Spock’s objectives are lofty as they intend to build the broadest and deepest people specific search engine. The Spock home page provides the user with a traditional search box where you can search for people. I did a search for Mahatma Gandhi and it returned me a picture, some biographical information and websites to find information about him. You are not limited to searching for people’s names however. You can search for a category or class of person or subject. For instance, you can search for a term like Pro Football Hall of Fame and have returned players such as Dan Marino and Warren Moon who are in the Hall of Fame. You can also do a search for global warming and have it return people such as Al Gore and Bill Clinton. The search possibilities are obviously endless and you are only limited by your imagination. If you aren’t in the mood for searching however, Spock also provides three categories of lists 10 deep below the search box, that one can browse called people, news and searches. My first impressions of this search engine are quite positive and I can now see why it has received some glowing reviews.

Besides Spock there are also some other people search engines available that you can try right now without needing an invitation that are also quite capable at finding people on the web. Some interesting people search engines worth checking out include Wink People Search, yoName, ex.plode.us, TrueScoop, and ZabaSearch. Most of these search across various databases, the web and various social networking sites to provide you with results. Each is a little different than the other and they each have their strengths and weaknesses. You will probably need to do some experimenting to see which one works for you and which you prefer. There are most likely other people search engines but these are just a few I was able to discover that were worth mentioning.