Ari Klinger’s Blog

Whether you’re searching about a new potential employee, business partner, life partner or just plain curious… It’s important to know how to find out more info about people online.

I’ve been getting a bunch of people asking me about search engines specifically related to finding out more about people recently, so here is a brief summary.

I always suggest starting with a generic search engine like www.google.com – it pretty much indexes all the major sources online, and works pretty well most of the time. Where you start getting in to trouble, is if you are looking for a generic name, and there are 10 000 people all with the same name!

Also useful to try out Google’s Image Search to find people with common names, and also very useful if you have a generic name or a name where you can’t tell the gender to see the kind of results you get.

Don’t forget the basics with sites like www.whitepages.com or (in Australia) www.whitepages.com.au (the online version of the old fashioned telephone book)

Once you’ve done that, you can try out some people specific search engines like:

• Some people specific search engines, using multiple sources (eg web, social sites, images, news etc)
  • http://www.peekyou.com
  • http://www.yasni.com
  • http://www.123people.com/
  • http://www.pipl.com
  • http://wink.com
  • http://www.yoname.com – searches multiple social sites (like 43Things BlackPlanet Blogger Buzznet DailyMotion Deviantart Digg FaceBook Flickr Fotolog Friendster GrazeIt IRC-Galleria Last.fm LinkedIn MySpace Netlog Rediff skyrock SmugMug Twitter Vox Webshots Yelp YoName YouTube etc)
  • http://klout.com/ – twitter search to see how much influence someone has (only has registered users and top people registered)

And a couple of USA only sites:

• http://www.zabasearch.com – USA search of public records for people
• http://criminalsearches.com – as the name suggests, find out if someone has a criminal record (for detailed info, you need to pay)

Good luck, happy searching!

Almost 20,000 people have voted in a Fairfax Media poll on internet censorship and 96 per cent of respondents oppose the filters, which the Government itself has admitted could be easily bypassed and do not cover peer-to-peer, instant messaging or other communications protocols.Nearly 120,000 Australians signed a petition against internet censorship by online activist group GetUp.In an interview with Fairfax Radio this morning, Kirby said some circles feared the controversial policy would be “the thin end of the wedge of the Government moving in to regulating the actual internet itself”.

via Net filters ‘thin end of the wedge’: Kirby.

Google snaps up mobile ad startup for $816 millionNovember 10, 2009 – 9:57AMGoogle is buying mobile advertising network AdMob for $US750 million A$816 million, underscoring the internet search leader’s determination to ensure its marketing machine reaches the growing number of people surfing the web on phones.The all-stock deal announced Monday also represents the latest sign that Google’s leaders are feeling better about the economy’s direction, encouraging them to spend more freely after clamping down through much of this year.

via Google snaps up mobile ad startup for $816 million.

At least one company is making money off of social networking. The game developer behind ‘FarmVille’ and ‘Mafia Wars’ has seen its web-based games take off – and deliver profits.Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of ZyngaMark Pincus, founder and CEO of ZyngaOn any given day 500,000 tractors are sold on the Internet. But don’t start buying stock in John Deere or Caterpillar just yet. These are $20 “virtual” tractors that belong to the 50 million players of FarmVille, the largest and fastest-growing social game on the Internet.Social games are free online applications accessed through sites such as MySpace and Facebook. If you’ve spent any time on either site you’re probably familiar with titles such as FarmVille, Mafia Wars, and Caf World. All three games, which rank among the top five games played daily on Facebook, were developed by San Francisco-based Zynga, one of the tech sector’s most talked-about companies these days.

via ‘FarmVille’ gamemaker Zynga sees dollar signs – Fortune Brainstorm Tech.

WIth the rise of Web phones like the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Palm (Verizon’s CEO says that 40% of its new phone sales are such smartphones), mobile advertising promises to be a huge growth area. The Kelsey Group, a market research firm, projects that the mobile advertising market will balloon from $160 million in 2008 to $3.1 billion in 2013.

Of course, that is just an educated guess which will turn out wrong. But there is no doubt that mobile advertising will be much bigger in four years, perhaps even ten to 20 times bigger than it is today. Where will all of that mobile ad money go to? Here I think the Kelsey group is more on target. It projects that mobile search will go from 24 percent of the total mobile ad market last year to 73 percent of the much larger pie in 2013, according to a recent research note put out by Citi analyst Mark Mahaney, which is where I’m getting all of these numbers.

Display ads are projected to go from 13 percent of the total to 18 percent, while SMS ads will decline as a percentage from 63 percent to 9 percent (see charts). So once again it looks like search is going to be the big winner. No wonder Google is so focused on mobile search as one of its major sources of growth.

Think about it. Display ads take up precious real estate on your phone screen and tend to just get in the way and be an annoyance. That’s why most people don’t like them. But when you are doing a search on your phone, you are often looking for something nearby—a store, a restaurant, a dry cleaner. You are more open to ads, especially if they are relevant to your search.

via Mobile Advertising Is Shaping Up To Be All Search.

If you blog, you know that it’s good for your business.But how — and how much?

To answer to those questions, I looked at data from 1,531 HubSpot customers mostly small- and medium-sized businesses. 795 of the businesses in my sample blogged, 736 didn’t.The data was crystal clear: Companies that blog have far better marketing results. Specifically, the average company that blogs has: 55% more visitors 97% more inbound links 434% more indexed pages.

Read the full article from Hubspot here

I’ve had a few people ask me about free online dating sites recently. Thought I would share a few popular ones here:

• www.plentyoffish.com - the 800 pound gorilla of free dating sites
• www.oasisactive.com – a more classical dating site, but free
• www.badoo.com – a social site with an interesting twist to meet new people

MSNBC.com has acquired EveryBlock, a Chicago-based Web site that collects local news and public information on a block-by-block level for 15 cities.

Financial terms of the all-cash deal, which was announced Monday, were not disclosed. MSNBC.com is a joint venture between Microsoft and NBC Universal.

Adrian Holovaty, a Naperville native, founded EveryBlock in 2007 and has funded the site with a two-year, $1.1 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The funding ran out in July.

via MSNBC.com acquires EveryBlock: MSNBC buys Chicago-based local news Web site Everyblock — chicagotribune.com.

Amazon.com Inc., making the biggest acquisition in its 14-year history, said it would buy rival online footwear retailer Zappos.com Inc. for about $847 million in cash and stock.

The Seattle e-commerce giant’s purchase reflects its most serious effort to tap into Internet sales of apparel, the largest online-shopping category and one in which Amazon has had limited success in the past.

via Amazon Opens Wallet, Buys Zappos – WSJ.com.