Yasni – Find information about people on the web

Posted on November 9, 2008 at 5:54 am

Searching for people online is a big business, believe it not! Million of people search for information about someone else everyday. I’ve already written about two online web services that can help you find people by searching their names: Spock and ZabaSearch, the latter allowing you to find public information like phone numbers, addresses, date of births for free.

Each people search engine find information differently, some scan the web, some hit public databases, etc, so it’s always a good idea to use multiple people search engines when trying to get information about someone online.

Yasni is another people search engine that does a fairly good job of getting useful information about a person. Note that ZabaSearch is much better if you want to know more real world details, like phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, etc.

Yasni is good if you want to search the Internet and get a picture of how a person shows up in the virtual world. Kind of like a track of their online activities rather than their physical location.

For example, searching for myself in Yasni brought up the follwing results:

As you can see, anyone searching my name will immediately know that I am a blogger! It also found my Amazon.com profile, my LinkedIn profile, and even my Friendster profile. I am surprised that it did not find my Facebook profile!

It also found a lot of articles where my name is mentioned, including my own blog and other blogs where I wrote guest posts. It also found my name on other sites related to my blogging. Not bad! Of course, if someone doesn’t have a blog, doesn’t have any online profiles, then you won’t see much in terms of results.

However, that is exactly what you might want. For employers, this is a good tool to make sure someone isn’t all over the Internet saying crazy things or posting wild stuff about themselves.

The interesting thing about Yasni is that it also shows you a tag cloud and a set of images that could match the name. In my case, my picture showed up 4 times!

Again, I’m all over the Internet, so it’s not too hard to find me. The really cool feature of Yasni, though, is that you can use it to TRACK people over a period of time. At the bottom of the results, click on Search Agent and enter your email address. Yasni will send you a weekly email with all the new search results for a particular name!

That’s pretty cool! It’s basically a people monitoring service for free! So if there is someone you want to constantly monitor, maybe an employee or friend or colleague, then create a search agent and whenever their name pops up on some webpage on the Internet, you’ll get to know about it.

So what if you want to remove something that showing up in the search results about you? Well, there’s not really much you can do other than using third party services. I’ve written a post on how to get your name out of the search engines, so be sure to read that if you have this problem. Enjoy!

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