Last night I attended a panel discussion moderated by Michael Arrington on the subject of people search. The panel included execs from three “people search engines”:
- Michael Tanne (CEO of Wink)
- Bryan Burdick (COO of Zoominfo)
- Jaideep Singh (CEO of Spock)
For more information about these companies you can read Michael’s article here:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/09/war-of-the-people-search/
Considering that 30% of all searches on Google or Yahoo! are somehow people related, people search could potentially become one of the interesting vertical search wars to watch in the near future. But, what really intrigued me were the challenges in this market and how these three companies have failed to properly address them:
1) Monetization: Unlike product search, people search is very hard to be monetized. While people search engines could potentially have more data about their users (probably not as much as Yahoo! and Google), click through ratio on these engines are inevitably very low.
2) Data Collection: As Wall Street Journal noted, there are various issues with collecting and classifying data belonging to a particular person. (for example, there are 158 million results on Google for the query “John Smith”)
3) Data ownership: imagine if your identity on the web is falsely associated with the term “rapist”; this obviously will concern you and thus it’s very important to assign owners to update/correct the data. Hence, tere are two approaches:
1. Let the community own it. The approach will have the risk of incorrect/offensive data and a very probable set of lawsuits.
2. Let users claim their own identity. This approach is also troublesome simply because user authentication is a huge problem.
In summery, these companies don’t have a clear business model (except for Zoominfo which is subscription based), are facing major technical issues in regards to data collection and classification, and finally run the risk of completely misrepresenting an identity.
Now, here is my question: How on earth were they able to raise between 7 to 9 million dollars? Is that sign of a bubble or are the VCs rushing to get a piece of the pie?
