As their website cleary says “Whozat?” is a search engine designed to find and display information about people.” Whozat? has recently been recognized by several companies as being one of the hottest new startups today. So naturally, this peaked my curiosity and I decided to poke around a bit. What makes Whozat? different than almost any other search engine in the world is that it uses semantic technology to understand relationships and relevancy for searches. An interesting idea, by why not just use Google to search for someone? Excellent question, let’s take a look…
First off, let’s take a look at what happens when I do a search for me (jacob morgan)
Notice that the search fields are really simple, nothing fancy going on here (on the front end). For more accurate results you can enter in a particular keyword to help identify the person e.g. in my case I would enter in “marketing” as a keyword. After running my search several results came up. Now, while a search for “jacob morgan” in Google will return this blog as the first result, a search for “jacob morgan” in “whozat?” returned this blog as the number 4 result, my twitter profile and a twitter status page ranked above the blog, as did a long abandoned domain “www.jacobmorgan.com.”
However, thanks to the “It’zat” and “Not’zat”
drop down arrow next the results, I can tell “whozat?” wether or not I feel the search results are accurate or not. After clicking “It’zat” next to my blog, I now tell the search engine what I want to see when I do a search for “jacobmorgan.”
Now when I do a search for “jacob morgan,” here are what a few of the returned search results look like. Try searching for yourself or for a friend, you may surprised by what you may find.
“Whozat?” also has a few extra form fields you can use to help narrow your search down even further. These form fields allow you to enter in a particular location, sex, (male/female), and age.
This little extra step of refining the results really allows you to get accurate search results for people. Whozat? is still in beta so I’m sure over the coming months they are going to really work on improving their search and their feature set. As of now, it looks like their primary revenue model comes from advertsing. Whozat? has received a fair amount of praise over the last few months. Here are the recent traffic trends according to compete.com
Give Whozat? a shot and let me know what you think.
Thanks for reading
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