In the past 24 hours Facebook started allowing people to claim custom URLs, using their real names, for their personal Facebook profiles.

This will make searching and finding people on the Facebook social network easier, especially when searching for a person whose Facebook profile has been indexed by a search engine like Google.

In the first three minutes, about 200,000 people claimed their usernames. After fifteen minutes, Facebook users had chosen half a million custom URLs. After one hour, over 1 million people on Facebook had claimed usernames.

From the numbers you can see that this URL service has been very popular with Facebook users and should make people searches online that much easier for people who are trying to find old friends, coworkers and family.

Source: Mashable.com

According to a recent CNN article, people who search online for phrases like “song lyrics” or “free” are engaging in risky search engine behavior. Along with “free music downloads”, these search terms put 20 percent of search engine users in danger of landing on sites that push malicious software, known as “malware.”

A research report by antivirus software company McAfee has found the most dangerous search engine terms that can land people on pages with a high likelihood of virus and malware attacks.

The McAfee study looked at 2,600 popular keywords used on the Google, Yahoo, Live, AOL and Ask search engines. The study then analyzed approximately 413,000 Web pages that rank for those search terms.

Categories that had the highest risk of contaminating your PC with viruses and malware are: screen savers, free games, work from home, Olympics, videos, celebrities, music and news.

The riskiest phrases were: word unscrambler, lyrics, myspace, free music downloads, phelps, game cheats, printable fill-in puzzles, free ringtones and solitaire.

The study also showed how cyber criminals are increasing in sophistication and how antivirus software often lags behind the latest developments by cyber criminals.

Despite the growing virus and malware risks, McAfee CEO David DeWalt doesn’t believe there will be a “cyber Armageddon” that will cause worldwide destruction of servers, computers and web infrastructure.

However, he did say that “In the past year, we’ve seen a pretty dramatic shift in what we call malware.”

DeWalt further noted that: “It went from a hacker in a basement, to organized cybercrime to now, literally, terrorism and other forms of organized geopolitical attacks.”

Source: CNN.com

A recent decision by Facebook could make online people searches easier than ever.

Facebook announced that, as of this Saturday, they will start publishing URLs ( web addresses ) for user’s profiles, using people’s real names.

These new search engine friendly URLs will make finding past friends and family on Facebook through normal search engine searches easier than ever, further shrinking the degrees of separation in our virtual online world.

Kudos to Facebook for this decision.

Source: Facebook.com

Twitter is a goldmine of two things: people and the topics they are currently talking about.

There are numerous services out there that help you mine the Twitter database to find out information on the trending topics on Twitter as well as the people who are tweeting about them, here are a few:

Hashtags.org -
this site posts real-time information about Twitter’s hot topics (#hashtags).

Back Tweets -
a search service that finds out how many links to a web site have been posted on Twitter.

Retweetability Index -
a site that measures and ranks Twitter users based on the influence of their tweets.

Twitter Search -
Twitter’s own search engine function for searching people and topics on Twitter.

Tweet Effect -
allows Twitter users to find out which Twitter updates made people follow or leave them.

Tweet Scan -
a keyword search engine and popularity cloud of topics on Twitter.

Tweet Stats -
people can graph their Twitter stats with this service.

Tweet Volume -
search for keyword or phrase volume on Twitter.

Twinfluence -
lets people calculate the indirect influence of themselves and their followers on Twitter.

Twist -
a search and statistical tool that allows people to find the trends on Twitter.

Twitalyzer -
is a Twitter tool that measures the activity of a given Twitter user and reports on their influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, and other key success measures on Twitter.

Twitter Sheep -
a Twitter application that allows people to form a tag cloud based on the biographical information of their followers.

Twitter Friends -
Twitter friends lets you find out about the hidden network of Twitter contacts that are relevant to you; visualize the Twitter network of relevant contacts and their contacts and see which of your Twitter contacts are online at the moment.

Twitturly.com -
a real-time report of the top links posted on Twitter.

Source: KD Nuggets Data Mining Resources

The Classmates.com people search is typically used by a person to reunite with former classmates that they have lost contact with, but it has recently reunited a brother and sister that had been separated for over 40 years.

Mobile, Alabama pastor Joseph Lett ( age 48 ) used the Classmates people search to find his long-lost sister that he had been told about by his mother, when he was only 10 years old. The only information he had for his search was his sister’s first name “Patricia”.

It just so happens that Patricia had been living 2,000 miles away in Sacramento, California, raising a family with six grown children. Patricia had always wondered about the life that she never had with her family.

Patricia had been given up at birth and never knew her biological family. She spent her life with a couple of foster mothers until adulthood.

About a month ago, Patricia updated her social network profiles on Match.com and Myspace. She added current pictures and wrote about her childhood spent with foster parents.

At the same time, Joseph began searching on Classmates.com for his long-lost sister.

Joseph says, “I went online and I typed in Patricia Lett under the search and her picture showed up. The picture spoke a thousand words.”

He instantly recognized the features of his mother in Patricia’s face.

Joseph then sent an e-mail to Patricia’s Classmates.com e-mail address, but she did not respond. He then tried searching for her on Myspace, where he made contact with her.

The two eventually talked on the phone, where they confirmed that Joseph’s mother Lilly Bell Lett was the mother listed on Patricia’s birth certificate.

Another successful family reunion thanks to the power of web searching and social networks.

Source: ABC News

Topsy is a new social network search engine that searches conversations from online web 2.0 communities and returns search results based on the timely topical “chatter” that occurs on those communities every minute.

Some of the social networks and online communities that Topsy takes its search results from are Twitter, blogs, Flickr, Digg, Yelp, Identica as well as a host of other social networks and web 2.0 sites.

According to the Topsy “about us” page: “People use these communities to share reviews, opinions, messages, comments and discussions about things. Topsy indexes those things. Topsy indexes what people are talking about.”

The Topsy.com search works in real-time, unlike most other search engines. Topsy’s search engine results are timely and current, because they are pulled from what people are talking about right now, this week or over the past month.

Topsy can help you get up-to-the minute search results for any topic you wish, including people, celebrity gossip, news etc.

You can use the Topsy real-time search engine for yourself @ Topsy.com

The Twitter people search isn’t always the best way to find people based on a business or occupation. Twellow.com is the Twitter yellow pages that organizes Twitter users based on business and professional areas.

You can search with a keyword like “accountant” or “skip tracer”. You can also find people by browsing the Twellow directory with dozens of professional categories.

Twellowhood allows you to find people on Twitter based on location or geographic region. So you can find Twitter users in your area or in other areas of the USA and Canada.

You can visit the Twellow Yellow Pages @ Twellow.com and Twellowhood @ Twellowhood.

Skipease.com has just published a downloadable presentation of free people search tips with online people search tools for anyone out there who is trying to reconnect with past friends and family.

You can view, download and share the people search tips on scribd.com @ Free People Search Tips.

At Google’s “Searchology” event this week, the search engine giant announced that it has tweaked its search alogrithm so that it pulls more personal information from user-created sites like Yelp and social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn.

The aim of this new improvement is meant to make people searches more powerful. People searches will now return more names, titles and locations, so as to improve results on people search queries.

The new personal information will help Google stay on top of the people search market.

Source: Google Improves People Search

Here is a great story about how simple internet searches in the “age of Google” are reuniting people with past friends and family …

Two military buddies from two different countries were recently reunited after 50 years apart, thanks to the power that internet searching has given people to find one another.

Army officer Gene Kean was reunited with his friend Anh Vo, a former South Vietnamese army colonel, after 50 years apart and decades of searching.

Vo traveled to Lawrence Kansas on April 25 to meet with Kean after searching for him for decades.

“We are very happy,” Vo said. “I didn’t think I could find him, but I tried. I tried many times.”

The two military friends met in 1958 at the U.S. Army Engineer School in Fort Belvoir, VA, when Vo arrived in the US for training, after graduating from the Military Academy of Vietnam.

The friendship grew from that point on. Vo said he would practice his English with Kean. Kean taught him how to play football and played the piano for them. Kean even invited Vo and another officer to his home in Olathe to spend Christmas in Kansas.

When Vo graduated from the officers’ school in 1959, the two went their separate ways.

Vo’s son finally helped find Kean using free people search sites on the internet, and the two friends were finally reunited.

The two military buddies say their next reunion will be much sooner.

“We’ll try to keep meeting, if we have the chance to,” Vo said. “We don’t know how long we’ll be alive, so we’ll take time to enjoy it. We’re very close, very good friends. He’s a brother.”

Source: Kansas man reunited with friend after 50 years