If you’ve been online for any amount of time, if you know your way around the Internet and are generally aware of how the system works, if you have established your online presence and left your mark behind, you would definitely be guilty of doing a vanity search at some point of time. And if you haven’t, well, all I can say is that you’re missing out on one of the simple and unexpected pleasures that the Internet offers.

A vanity search on Google or any other search engine throws up the names of sites that feature your name on the net – on online networking sites, as bylines if you’ve written articles or have your own blog, and elsewhere too. Of course, if you share the name of a celebrity, then you’re out of luck because you have to provide more detailed search terms if you want to filter your name from the millions of hits that a celebrity’s name is bound to return.

They’re called vanity searches, but very often, they help do much more than just feed your ego. When you search for your name online, you can see what others are saying about you, or if they’re talking about you at all. Sometimes the latter may turn out to be a blessing in disguise, because, as the saying goes, no news is akin to good news.

If people are talking about you, you better hope that it’s all good, because when it’s not flattering, you don’t have much of a chance at either retribution or rebuttal.

Because of the cloak of anonymity that it offers, the Internet is a place where you can slander people’s good names and more often than not, get away with it. So unless you wish and are prepared to see the matter through, to go to court and procure an order that forces service providers and web hosts to reveal the identity of the people who dragged your good name through the mud, you’re most likely left with no satisfactory course of retaliation.

Even otherwise, it’s good to keep track of what people are saying about you, especially if you tend to live life in the limelight and if your actions and people’s perception of them could cause inconveniences or hindrances in your life. A word of caution though – don’t take every random mention of your name to heart, whether good or bad. It’s just not worth it, not when there’s bound to be something new in a few days.

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This guest article was written by Adrienne Carlson, who regularly writes on the topic of forensic scientist schools. Adrienne welcomes your comments and questions at her email address: adrienne.carlson83@yahoo.com.

The 123People.com people search has been added to the Skipease main Free People Search page.

123People.com makes finding someone easy and is one of the web’s best people search engines at the moment. 123People can search for a person across social networks, people search sites, blogs and deep web public record searches.

123People searches for people on the top social networks like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and other social networks. The 123People search also searches the person’s name on web search engines like Google and Bing.

In addition, 123People can search other online sources like pictures, blogs, MS Word documents etc. all from one people search engine.

Personas is a people search engine created by Aaron Zinman from MIT’s Media Lab. You search for your name or someone else’s name on Personas and the search engine searches the web for the context associated with it and returns a graphical profile of your online persona.

Taking someone’s name as input Personas then culls the web for information to characterize the person. Personas does this by associating the name with a set of categories created from a massive index of personal information. The search process is shown visually with each level of the processing search with the final search result showing a personal profile associated with the given name.

Personas shows the way the web sees someone’s name online. For people who have common names, the results will vary.

You can watch a demo of the Personas search engine on the YouTube video below or visit the site for yourself @ Personas.

Source: TechCrunch

Indeed.com is now the fastest growing job search engine in the US according to ComScore.

With the unemployment rate high, more and more people are going online for their job search. Job search engines are growing as a result of this demand.

However, the Indeed job search site appears to be growing the fastest.

According to ComScore July 2009 job search traffic for Monster.com was up 33 percent in the US and CareerBuilder.com was up 56 percent, but traffic to the Indeed.com job search was up a whopping 90 percent.

Indeed.com is considered to be the fastest growing online job search in the US and is the largest job search site when ranked by pageviews.

In July, Indeed.com surpassed CareerBuilder, with 171 million pageviews in the U.S. compared to Careerbuilder’s 159 million. Yahoo’s HotJobs had 96 million pageviews, Monster.com had 73 million pageviews, and the SimplyHired job search trailed with 26 million pageviews.

CareerBuilder still leads among unique visitors with 10.1 million in July compared to 8.7 million for Indeed.com ( ranked number 2 for unique visitors )

These traffic numbers measure each site’s core job search traffic and do not include other areas of the sites like posted resumes, career advice, or professional tools.

Source: TechCrunch.com

The problem of fake personals profiles on dating sites is a problem for real users of those sites.

A personals profile verification service CheckedProfile has launched in the US to help people with this problem.

People upload a picture of themselves on CheckedProfile.com. CheckedProfile givers the person a unique identifier for the picture. The person then writes the identifier on a sheet of paper and takes a picture of themselves holding that page. The person then uploads the second picture to CheckedProfile and fills out the information on a CheckedProfile account. After all of this is done a live person at CheckedProfile verifies that the person in both images is the same.

Verified people are then free to use their CheckedProfile picture on any online dating site where they want to proof of their identity.

The verification process at CheckedProfile seems tedious for users and labor intensive for CheckProfile, if they have to verify each profile one-by-one with an actual person. It will be interesting to see how popular this service becomes with people and how CheckedProfile manages all of the verifications if their profile verification system works.

You can visit their site @ CheckedProfile.

Source: TechCrunch

According to a recent survey conducted by CareerBuilder, 45% of employers reported using social networks to screen prospective job candidates. This is a significant jump from 22 percent last year. Approximately 11 percent stated that they plan to start using social networks to research potential employees in the future.

Over 2,600 hiring managers were included in the survey, which was completed in June.

Of the employers who do online searches, due diligence and background checks on job candidates, 29% use Facebook, 26% use LinkedIn and 21% use MySpace. About 11% search blog posts and 7% search Twitter profiles.

No suprisingly, the top industries that use social networks and search engines to research job candidates via social networking sites are those that specialize in technology and sensitive information, including IT employers at 63% and Professional and B2B Services at 53%.

Over one third of employers say they have found online content on social networks that caused them not to hire a job candidate.

14% of employers have passed on a potential employee because the job candidate sent an online message using an emoticon and 16% report excluding a job candidate for using shorthand text language such as LOL in an email or application.

In addition, 18% of employers say they have found content on social network profiles that caused them to hire a job candidate.

Rosemary Haefner is Vice President of Human Resources at CareerBuilder and advises job seekers that: “Social networking is a great way to make connections with potential job opportunities and promote your personal brand across the Internet. Make sure you are using this resource to your advantage by conveying a professional image and underscoring your qualifications.”

Rosemary gives the following specific advice for people seeking jobs —–

1. Clean up digital dirt BEFORE you begin your job search. Remove any photos, content and links that can work against you in an employer’s eyes.

2. Consider creating your own professional group on sites like Facebook or BrightFuse.com to establish relationships with thought leaders, recruiters and potential referrals.

3. Keep gripes offline. Keep the content focused on the positive, whether that relates to professional or personal information. Makes sure to highlight specific accomplishments inside and outside of work.

4. Remember that other people can see your friends, so be selective about who you accept as friends. Monitor comments made by others. Consider using the “block comments” feature or setting your profile to “private” so only designated friends can view it.

5. Do not mention your job search if you’re still employed.

Source: MarketWatch.com

The New York State Supreme Court has ordered Google to reveal the identity of an anonymous blogger who posted defamatory comments about model Liskula Cohen on Google’s Blogger site.

Google fought to keep the blogger’s identity anonymous. However a judge ordered Google to hand over the blogger’s internet IP address, rejecting the legal claim that the online comments were “personal opinions”.

Protection of anonymous speech is a complex legal issue. Protection of anonymous opinions vary by state. In some states, the plaintiff only needs to prove that the request to reveal the blogger is being made in good faith. In other states, the plaintiff has to show evidence that damage has been done to their reputation.

Cohen stated that the anonymous blogger’s posts made it harder for her to find modeling work since the blog along with posted pics often came up in her job interviews. Cohen claimed the blogger’s comments labeling her as “skanky” and being a “ho” defamed her “serial monogamist” traits. Since this legal case was decided by the New York State Supreme Court it’s likely that the court’s opinion will carry significant legal weight and insuring that the controversial debate over anonymous internet opinions will continue to rage on.

Source: PCWorld

For more information on this issue you can watch the YouTube video below:

The snitch.name site let’s users search people profiles on multiple social networks and people search sites. Users can pick and choose which sites to search from a list of 39 of the top social networks and people search engines.

Some of the searches that snitch.name includes in their list are useless at best, but the site does include popular social network searches like Facebook, Twitter, Hi5, Netlog, Myspace and Linkedin.

The Snitch search engine also includes some good online people search engines like Pipl, 123People, Wink and Zoominfo.

You can try the Snitch social search for yourself at Snitch.

A recent study by a US marketing firm suggests that as much as 40% of tweets on Twitter are ‘pointless babble’.

Pear Analytics randomly sampled 2,000 tweets from Twitter’s public stream and divided them into six categories: news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversational and pass-along value.

Pear found that 811 of the sampled tweets ( 40.55 percent ) fell into the “pointless babble” category.

About 751 ( 37.55 percent ) of the sampled messages were categorized as Conversational messages. Conversational messages are defined by Pear as tweets that go back and forth between Twitter users.

Pear found that only 8.70% of tweets had “pass-along value”. These were tweets that users “re-tweeted” or passed on to their followers.

Corporate self-promotion accounted for 5.85% of tweets, followed by blatant Twitter spam at 3.75%.

News from media outlets accounted for only 3.60 percent of all the tweets sampled.

Pear plans to run the study every quarter to identify Twitter trends.

Source: Breitbart.com

Twitter and Facebook, two of the web’s top social networks, are aiming to be the number one player in real-time search.

About a year ago, Twitter acquired real-time search engine Summize, a search engine that indexes tweets. Shortly after the Summize acquisition Twitter rolled out Twitter Search and the era of real-time search started.

Since then, the area of real-time search has taken off. Twitter Search and Twitter’s trending topics have become a mainstay of Twitter’s microblogging platform and has also become one of the top searches for monitoring breaking and current news stories.

For a year, Twitter had no big rivals in the real-time search arenea. However, that all changed overnight when Facebook took over FriendFeed and rolled out their real-time search engine last week. Facebook’s real-time search can search status updates on user profiles; track pictures, personal notes, online videos etc.

Will Facebook’s acquisition moves and larger membership numbers and make Twitter’s real-time search irrelevant or will Twitter find a way to trump Facebook’s moves into the Twitter territory?

Twitter’s real-time search has only been in use for a year. However, it is positioned as the current leader in real-time search. When you want to find out what people are saying about current news stories you go to Twitter.

According to Mashable.com, Twitter has 3 main advantages over Facebook:

1] First mover advantage.

2] More experience with real-time search.

3] An open platform.

Even though Facebook’s real-time search is only a week old, their new real-time search can search a lot more than just status updates. Facebook’s real-time search has access to over 250 million users, the world’s largest social network can search photos, popular links, current events, applications and more.

Mashable.com notes some advantages that Facebook’s search has over Twitter search:

1] More users.

2] A more diverse search tool.

3] Talent and real-time search technology acquired from FriendFeed.

Either social network could win the real-time search race or Google could launch a powerful real-time search engine and wipe out both Facebook and Twitter from the real-time search market.

Source: Mashable