A couple of years ago, people started "Googling" each other. (Insert wisecrack here. No, not there... here!)
Anyway, I'm sure we're all painfully aware of the limitations of searching on a person's name. Problem #1 is that Google will return a jumble of results on different people with the same name. If there are a couple hundred "gary goodmans" of note, you have no way of grouping the results for just one of these individuals. Overall, the data is quite unstructured. A second problem is the negativity issue. Some observers think that Google's PageRank tends to bring negative mentions to the fore.
Enter Business.com's new people search. While not perfect, it's an interesting little hack. Searching for a couple of example colleagues, I notice how the tool managed to extract correct title and educational background from the various sources on the web. The sources accessed also seem to be more restrictive, and from a B2B perspective, that leads to a more professional overview. Web indices today are clogged with junk.
Maybe I just liked it because on the list of Andrew Goodmans, I appeared at the top. A bit further down, I was also listed, as the "owner" of Topica. Apparently that was a glitch, as I owned a public discussion list hosted by Topica a couple of years ago. So, there are glitches. But as an effort in taking public, unstructured data, and using it to create personal profiles, it's cool.
A potentially important development is the opportunity for "that gary goodman" to see his own profile, and click on a link to submit an updated profile. Colleagues can also send an email to the recipient to ask them to update it. Obviously the question is always "will anyone do this" or "will this catch on" - but it's interesting in theory.
Getting "business.com'd" might not be as snappy-sounding as getting Googled, but it'll probably show you in a better light.
Posted by Andrew Goodman
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