Inflection.com who operates Archives, a family history website, and PeopleSmart, its search engine for
people, raised $30 million in its first round of venture capital financing this week.
Inflection.com owns Archives.com, and PeopleSmart.com, which aggregate public records and data from
past and present, and turns those results into useable, and possibly actionable, data.
PeopleSmart.com, the actual engine, combines contact information, public records, and social profiles and
pools that data from hundreds of sources into a search-able, search engine style platform.
This week, venture capital entities got in on the fun as Matrix Partners and Sutter Hill Ventures participated
in the 30 million dollar funding episode.
Matrix Partners have offices in California, Massachusetts, New York, India and China and has previously
invested in firms suchs as; Apple, Sandisk, Veritas, Sycamore Networks, Phone.com, Starent Networks,
JBoss and Gilt Groupe.
Sutter Hill Ventures was founded in 1964, and has invested in; Network Appliance, Legato, Data Domain,
Alteon, Linear Technology, nVidia, BroadVision, Shutterfly and QuinStreet to name a few.
The new Inflection search engine’s stated mission is to transform the public records industry and convince
you of it with a free 7 day trial and then $39.95 per year after that.
Inflection was founded four years ago by brothers Brian and Andrew Monahan. Brian, supposedly started
the search idea in his Harvard dorm room and his brother helped bootstrap it, to get it going.
The business seems to have been a very profitable venture, as “personal data searching” has gained
momentum over the past 4 years; This is most likely due to the increase in popularity with social media
outlets as well.
So how does this search engine work?
The historical records are made available through Inflection’s website; Archives.com and current records
are accessed through PeopleSmart.com.
They claim that this will all be privacy friendly.
PeopleSmart currently hosts 250 million+ social profiles, and 500 million public records, and an unspecified
amount of contact information for a percentage of U.S. households.
Some of the PeopleSmart features listed are: An email plug-in which they portray as “caller ID for your
inbox,” which will allow you to view a sender’s social profiles and photos with every email. Then,
PeopleSmart subscribers can use anonymous emails to make their email listings private, then it will relay
messages on behalf of its users; much like a secretary.
Theoretically, you will have “Control of Records” which PeopleSmart claims will allow users to manage their
listings online, submit corrections, and remove any information they don’t want people to see.
In addition, PeopleSmart claims it can search the actual court archives to retrieve and return court records.
They feel this is a good move based upon the idea that “people searching” currently appears to have large
verticals in the online search market.
Based upon some recent stats, 57% of adult Internet users use search engines to find information about
themselves online, another 46% of users search online to find info about other people from their past.
This is up from 36% from this type of searching in 2006. Traditionally this information has been highly
fragmented, and given the nature of the type of data, it is understandable why.
To me this begs the question, “Is this a good idea?”.
This information is for the most part, public knowledge and accessible already, they are simply making it
easier to access from a central location and dumbing it down so anyone can access it.
While I support free access of information and vehemently oppose censorship, except when it comes to
children, I have to question the motives at work, both by the provider and the user.
The search engine is not free like Google, it is only free for 7 days, then it is $39.95 per year.
To some in this economy, that might as well be $400 per year; that will remove the financially impacted
person’s ability to benefit from this searching, so apparently not every one will be able to use it.
Also, the “anonymous” ability by peoplesmart users, seems to leave open the ability for the bad guys to
hide even better for $39.99 per year, and remove crucial information from online sources that previously
they had no idea how to get rid of.
How will this interact with the “other” search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo? How will the results be
handled? Depending on how its implemented, I can see “back dooring” and “black hat”possibilities already
forming.
Possibly this could even start an “innovation war” like what happened with Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
I speculate that Intellius.com or similar currently existing person search tools are not going to just let
themselves get put out of business; they will have to address this new player head-on to stay relevant.
The only problem is that instead of playing with cool tools and pictures, we are now playing with people’s
personal information and privacy.
We will see how this develops over the coming months, but I remain apprehensive, to say the least.
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