Yasni Launches Beta Of First People Search Engine In Germany

After a few weeks of testing Frankfurt based yasni GmbH opened a beta of their search engine for people to the general public yesterday.

People search is a huge market – about a third of all searches are people related – and yasni wants to get a piece of the pie by helping you in two ways: provide a one stop shop for finding information on a person which is published on the web by aggregating search results at various services like Xing, LinkedIn, MySpace, Friendster, the Wikipedia, Google or Yahoo and give users a way to manage their reputation by letting them approve these results in a profile page.

Anyone else sees a conflict of interest here? Sure, many people would love to be represented on the web with search results that make them shine in the most glamorous light, but isn’t it the whole point of searching for someone to digg up those dirty little secrets they rather would like to keep for themselves? Just kidding of course, more often than not we are searching for factual information or plain contact data, but wouldn’t you like to make up your mind on your own based on unfiltered results and not based on information which has been approved by the searchee first?

But yasni does a decent job at combining the search results at those services and will be useful for everyone who does not fire up his custom made Yahoo pipe when searching for someone. Unlike its competitors in the US (Spock, PeekYou, etc.) yasni does less magic and restricts itself to displaying what easily can be found anyways. This makes perfect sense in Germany since privacy concerns are a huge issue here and related laws easily get a service into legal troubles.

myON-ID is a similar site from Germany which currently focuses on online reputation (see our coverage) but has plans to grow into a people search engine soon.

Company blog: yasni Blog