Track down old colleagues, roommates, or girlfriends with 123People

The Web seems like it would be perfect for tracking down old friends and colleagues. When I’m looking for someone my first thought is — just Google them. Because of the sheer mass of information indexed by search engines like Google, that’s a surprisingly inefficient approach.

123People is a search engine just for finding people. Their approach is to search through popular sites like Flickr and Facebook to come up with all information possible including email addresses and phone numbers.

I tried it with several former colleagues and found good results when their name was unusual. I also did an “ego” search on my own name and found me and several pictures I wish had never made it to the web.

Search 123People [via webworkerdaily]