War Of The People Search
I moderated a fascinating panel tonight at Google headquarters that included execs from three "people search engines" - the CEO of Wink (Michael Tanne), the CEO of Spock (Jaideep Singh), and the COO of Zoominfo (Bryan Burdick). — The panel was very timely.
Context & Ripple Effects
Nearly a year after Scobleizer asked where Google was while people-centric data piled up on social networks outside its link-based index, three startups betting on an answer shared one stage: Michael Tanne of Wink, Jaideep Singh of Spock, and Bryan Burdick of Zoominfo, in a panel moderated by TechCrunch at Google's own headquarters.
The venue is the point. These companies are building dedicated people-search indexes on the premise that finding a person is a different problem than ranking documents — and they staged their category debate inside the incumbent's building, with no confirmed sign that Google itself fields a competing product yet.
First-order effects
- Wink, Spock and Zoominfo are publicly framing people search as a distinct market rather than a feature of general web search — with Zoominfo's enterprise-people focus pulled into the same conversation as consumer-facing Wink and Spock.
- Google hosts a panel of three would-be competitors on its campus, underscoring that the incumbency question raised in the 2006 'where was Google?' critique is still open.
Second-order effects
- If any of the three gains traction, Google's lowest-cost response is folding people results into its main index rather than fielding a separate product — the scenario its critics flagged in July 2006.
- These startups depend on indexing profile data from social networks they don't control, so their product quality moves with other companies' privacy and access decisions.
Third-order effects
- Vertical search engines survive only where general-purpose ranking underperforms; if Google absorbs people search into the main results, the durable players will be those holding structured identity data, not just alternative crawls.
- Personal identity is emerging as a contested layer between search engines and social networks — a contest over who owns the authoritative record of a person online.
The trend: Search is fragmenting into vertical challengers that index people and social-graph data ahead of what general-purpose engines surface on their own.