The Reuters news service is reporting that Swedish software company Polar Rose is planning on making their facial recognition software publicly available on the internet within the first half of 2008. Polar rose is hoping that their service will become the must-have “killer app” of people recognition in digital images across the web.

Polar Rose claims that their recognition service can pick out people’s faces in the growing number of online images, making the images searchable just like words on a web page.

The Polar Rose software will be available as a free plug-in for web browsers and will also be placed on partner web sites. They hope to launch the service on the first partner sites as early as this month.

Current image searches use the text and words attached to an digital picture, which makes things difficult if the pictures are incorrectly tagged or are missing useful identification. Polar Rose will scan 2D digital images and construct a 3D model from the person’s face to create a “faceprint”, which will be stored and indexed for searches. This will allow people to sort and group people’s photos by face and allow people to search for similar photos across the world wide web.

Google also got into digital image search when they took over Neven Vision a year and a half ago.

This could be a major advance in locating a person through images using online people search engines. The better these technologies become at finding people’s faces in images the more likely you will be able to not only locate someone by name, phone number or address in a search, but, eventually, you should be able to locate their image with a digital “faceprint” search as well.

If this technology is ever paired with mapping services like Google Maps, you may be able to someday find a person’s image along with a name, time, date as well as the geographic location that the digital picture was taken in. Just think of the future possibilities as they relate to doing people searches. This could take the task of searching for a person to the next level. Just think of the possibilities.

Source: Reuters.com

Ted Rheingold has created a neat free people search extension for users of the Firefox web browser called “Who Is This Person?”

This handy web search extension allows users to highlight any person’s name on a web page to find out more about the person through information published on the web’s top social networking and people search sites like - MySpace.com, LinkedIn.com, Wink.com, Facebook.com, Wikipedia.com, Technorati.com, Google News, Yahoo People Search, Spock.com, WikiYou.com, ZoomInfo.com and others.

This is an easy way to quickly find information from numerous search sites, using one tool.

You can read more about the “Who Is This Person?” people finder extension and download it at Mozilla.org.

Here is an interesting and informative YouTube.com video news clip about one of America’s top bounty hunters, Jim Elliott.

Interestingly enough, Jim Elliott compares the job of a professional bounty hunter to that of a sales person. A major part of his job is the use of psychology and salesmanship to get the information and person he is searching for and close the deal.

Learn about the people search techniques and psychology used by this top bounty hunter to find people running from the law on the YouTube.com video below.

Breitbart.com is reporting that the free people search engine Spock.com has already indexed 100 million people and is adding new names to its search engine at the rate of a million a day. Spock.com is scheduled to open for public use in mid August. Spock.com is an ambitious people search effort that plans to eventually index billions of names worldwide.

From the article –

“We are a search engine organizing information about people,” Spock.com co-founder Jay Bhatti told AFP.

“How Google allows you to type anything and gives you a web document result, we give you results around people,” he said. “That’s how we differentiate ourselves from other search applications, because we are solely focused on people.”

The founders of Spock.com, which has been under development since 2006 in Redwood City, California, hope the website will eventually provide a search result for everyone in the world.

To index individuals, Spock.com scours through social networking websites such as MySpace, Friendster and Bebo.

But it also allows web surfers to add information about individuals to help Spock.com compile full profiles.

“We try to index people, but the machine is not enough to understand all the data,” Bhatti said. “That’s where the community comes in. As an user of Spock, you will be able to add keywords, pictures, and to upload pages about people.”

Source: Search engine revs up to look for billions of names

Mashable.com recently tested and reviewed six of Web 2.0’s people search engine sites.

The six people search sites that were tested and reviewed include: PeekYou.com, ZoomInfo.com, YoName.com, Wink.com, Spock.com and ex.plode.us.

You can read the people search reviews @ 6 People Search Engines Tested: Can They Find Me?.

Webware.com has given a bad review to the recent open beta launch of the PeekYou people search engine. The Webware review recommends using the Wink.com people search while we anxiously await the beta launch of the coming Spock.com people search engine.

According to the Webware review on PeekYou –

1. PeekYou claims to have 50 million people listings in its search engine database, but numerous listings can be found for one person, including over 700 for President George Bush alone.

2. There is not way to tell who’s who in a list of people with the same name.

3. The PeekYou people search database is full of useless or outdated personal information and social network links.

4. The PeekYou people search site isn’t ready for public access and not worth user’s time.

You can read the entire review of Webware’s review of the PeekYou people search site @ PeekYou people search can’t find Jack

There’s some serious internet buzz surrounding a new people search engine called Spock.com.

Spock.com hasn’t launched yet and you currently have to request to be included on an invite list to be one of the first people to test this new search engine out, but already the site is generating a lot of interest among web search and people search professionals. Already tech luminaries like Tim O’Reilly ( www.oreilly.com ) and Michael Arrington ( www.techcrunch.com ) have applauded Spock.com’s future entrance into the world of online people search.

The Spock.com web site claims that their people search engine has already indexed over 100 million people profiles and is adding millions more every day. If the Spock group continues to grow their people search engine with personal profiles and people search features, they will take the art of “Googling” people to a whole new level.

To read more about the Spock.com people search engine and it’s features, see Tim O’Reilly’s blog @ Why I’m so excited about Spock.

There is a new people search engine called “Wink” that allows users to do people searches across various social networks from a single search engine.

The Wink site currently allows users to search over 100 million people profiles on MySpace, Bebo and LinkedIn and they will be adding other social network sites as their search engine grows.

From the Wink press release –

Wink searches across over 100 million people from all walks of life,” said Michael Tanne, founder and CEO of Wink. “We are really excited about helping people connect across continents and cultures as our searchable index of public profiles from multiple social networks grows into the hundreds of millions.

SEARCHING SOCIAL NETWORKS WITH WINK

Wink provides a unique way to find new friends that share your interests online. By searching across multiple social networks, for the first time people have one place to find new friends, discover new interests and stay connected across many social networks. More than just a name search, Wink People Search also provides several ways to search for people by their interests, affiliations, general location (no addresses), musical tastes, age and occupation.

You can access the site at Wink.com

New Scientist Tech is reporting on a software program developed in Japan that makes common name Google people searches more accurate.

From the article -

Scouring the web for someone with a common name could become easier with software that automatically distinguishes between individuals by analysing the details of search results.

The software tool, developed by researchers at the University of Tokyo in Japan, picks apart the results of a search engine query, identifying unique identities within these results. For example, it can tell the difference between Michael Jackson the pop singer and a travelling beer expert of the same name, who also appears on the first page of results produced by Google.

The program analyses the first 100 results returned by Google in response to a name search. It then examines common words in each summary to see if any results may relate to different people with the same name.

The program clusters together results thought to relate to different people. For example, it creates one cluster of results for pop signer Michael Jackson, defined by key words such as “music” and “trial”, and another for beer expert Michael Jackson, defined by the words “beer” and “travel”. In testing, the software was between 70% and 95% accurate at telling apart people with the same name.

Source: Software distinguishes between online namesakes

The Maui News is reporting on mapping and cell phone locator technology that helps 911 dispatchers locate people in distress so that emergency crews can be dispatched to the caller’s location.

From the article –

The call came in the middle of the night, when a panicked visitor saw his friend’s car go off the road into a ditch.

“He didn’t know where he was,” said Maui police 911 dispatcher Dyann Cabreros, who handled the emergency call from the visitor using a cellular telephone who had been following his friend. “All he knew was he was in Haiku somewhere.”

Using new computer mapping technology, Cabreros tracked the caller’s location to the 2100 block of Kaupakalua Road. She quickly dispatched emergency crews to the scene of the 3:25 a.m. crash July 19.

Before the enhanced 911 system was developed, dispatchers would have to ask cellular callers for addresses or landmarks to try to determine where they were, Cabreros said.

“It would have definitely taken longer,” she said.

Last week, with the completion of testing for all five wireless carriers with service on the island, the Maui Police Department became the first in the state with the capability to identify phone numbers and locations of 911 callers using cellular telephones, said Lt. Tivoli Faaumu, commander of the police Communications Section.

Previously, he said that information could be tracked only for callers from land telephone lines, Faaumu said.

The wireless communication carriers on Maui are Nextel, Verizon Wireless, Cingular, T-Mobile and Sprint.

Source: 911 Dispatchers now able to locate people in distress