Spokeo Blog | Find People through People Search

The all-new Spokeo 3.0 is finally here.  Check out our new homepage:

We have added three new Business editions to better serve our business customers.  We have also revamped and upgraded our old HR product to the new Recruiting edition.  People search queries across all Spokeo products are now running on the new integrated platform below:

You should also notice speed and performance improvements.  One of our major 3.0 features, consumer data, was not able to make it into this release.  We are still working on it, and we hope to introduce it within the next two months.  Lastly, as with any major software release, there are still a lot of rough edges that we need to smooth out.  If you found any bug, please don’t hesitate to contact us right away.

The new Spokeo people search is coming in three weeks.  We’ve been working on the Spokeo 3.0 for couple months already, and now we are finally ready to release the first wave of new changes.  The above is an exclusive preview of the new Spokeo search interface.  As you can see, Spokeo search will now focus on finding the most comprehensive profile of the person; whereas, Spokeo reading list will remain focused on tracking friends’ updates. 

Underneath this brand new look, the new Spokeo search will now be able to discover and aggregate business-related information.  Prior to this upcoming 3.0 release, Spokeo is known for finding people’s social information across various social networks, photo albums, music sites, and other user-generated-content services.  In the next couple weeks, Spokeo will start aggregating other types of content to introduce new perspectives on people searches.  Hopefully you will find Spokeo even more indispensable for your day-to-day research.

We just got on the MSN front page couple hours ago.  As expected, hundred of thousands of people are flocking to Spokeo right now, and the incoming traffic is beyond our imagination.  The site has ground to a halt, and even we administrators cannot access it at the moment.  We don’t have a solution for this because we cannot stop people from coming to the site, and buying ten more servers today will not help our immediate needs.  As a result, we will just have to wait it out until the traffic subsides to a more reasonable level.

We are sorry about this service disruption to our existing users.  We’ve always planned to have 50% more capacity available to handle unexpected traffic spikes, and due to our planning, we have been able to weather through all the PCWorld, Wall Street Journal, Sina, and other mainstream press around the world.  However, getting on the third largest website in the world (msn.com) is a little bit too much for us to handle today.

Remember when you first googled yourself? You didn’t know want to expect, but you’ll have to admit that it was pretty darn cool to see yourself as a result.  You were, in fact, someone who Goggle felt important enough to index and share to the world. But after you goggled yourself (and of course others) you came to realize that there wasn’t much to it. Googling yourself and others became boring. There was no excitement in finding out what you likely already knew about yourself and others: college attended, a photo here or there, company employment roster, formerly authored school report, etc.

Where was all the "good stuff?"

The "good stuff" was being mined by people search companies like Spokeo People Search. Today, companies like this allow users to simply import their email contacts and obtain deep, comprehensive results. Full of photos, videos, blogs, and shopping lists, Spokeo People Search gives you true insight into someone’s lifestyle without jeopardizing privacy norms.  Check it out on Spokeo.com.

In essence, search has changed. Googling yourself and others has evolved into a specialized people search.

The great Benjamin Disraeli once said "Change is inevitable. Change is constant."  Searching yourself and others will never quite be the same.

As the need to find people becomes ever more common, people are associating Spokeo with People Search. A great example of this can be seen in a recent article published by the Wall Street Journal.

Simply stated by its author:

Spokeo.com is a search site operated by Spokeo Inc., a startup that lets users see what their friends are doing on other Web sites.

The best-selling financial newspaper in America mentions a few other people search technologies before wrapping up with:

Ruth Funabiki, a 57-year-old law librarian in Moscow, Idaho, recently discovered through Spokeo that a friend added something unusual to her wish list on Amazon.com: one of those disposable pads that protects mattresses from bedwetters. "There’s a voyeuristic aspect to it," she says. "I’m embarrassed. I shouldn’t be looking."

Spokeo is the only search engine to reveal this amount of detail. We are changing the nature of people search and turning it int o a much more personal experience. Previously, people search was only used by background checks companies and law enforcement. Now it is a tool for everyone.

Yahoo! People Search may appear to be the best choice for searching people given its brand power, however finding information about people is more than just displaying an address and a phone number. When you’re searching for someone you want more than cold, impersonal data; you want personal photos, videos, and blogs.

Well, look no further! Spokeo people search investigates deeper than any other search engine to show you what people have posted on the Web.  With Spokeo, we’ll search that person down even if they’re using the username "hotgirl69."  So go ahead and search people to see what you can find. We guarantee that you’ll be shocked.

I know everyone has heard of Craigslist since it is the place to find any bargain imaginable. If fact, to be quite honest, I purchased my current vehicle on the site some years back (Boy, did I get a sweet deal). But whatever your reason may be for surfing Craigslist, be it deals or dating, one thing is certain: you’ll have to meet the person face-to-face to finalize the transaction.

Well, if you’re like me, you’ll want to know a bit more about someone before meeting up at 9:45pm in a grocery store parking lot to buy a 32GB Ipod Touch. So why not learn something more through people search? Why not research this person online to make sure it’s someone you want to do business with?

Or for dating purposes, why not make sure this person has a clean MySpace page?

Well, with Spokeo people search it’s a done deal. Spokeo is designed to work with only an email address.

Remember, life is too valuable to meet up with complete strangers! So search people and be safe!

A lot of your friends don’t blog or upload photos regularly, but they actively maintain their profiles. From now on, you can track these profile changes on Spokeo. Whenever your friends update their info or share slideshow, you will know it right away.

This is a feature requested by our users a month ago, and now it’s done! Although we only got six people here, we do read everyone’s feedback. Sometimes we cannot fulfill user requests as fast as we’d like to, but we will always try our best.

We’ve just released an update that revamps our entire friend-finding usage flow. Our previous design was modeled after AIM and Yahoo Messenger, in which you have to press "+" to access any friend-finding functionality. Many people didn’t get that design analogy.

After reading all your feedback, we’ve realized that people want "search." We sat down and refocused the Spokeo interface around search. Now you can see a prominent search bar on the very top. If you want to import your friends, just click on "import" next to the search bar.

Try it out! I hope these changes will make Spokeo even simpler to use than before.

Up until this week, we didn’t have a designer on hand, so the search bar isn’t pretty by any means. Raphael, our new artist, will be improving our graphics, as well as making our minimalist design even cleaner.