123people

» see 123people.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

A people search engine only works on people whose name is on the web. In 2007 mine was not. The part of the internet I posted on ran on nicknames, and a signature block on a Turkish hardware forum listing my motherboard and my modem speed is not a record a machine can attach to a person. That is the honest reason this product and I never met: it needed a real-name web, and I was in the other one.

123people came out of Vienna on 1 July 2007, built inside the i5invest incubator with money from Gamma Capital Partners, and founded by Martin Stemeseder and Markus Wagner. You gave it a name. It queried more than two hundred sources at once, including the parts of the web that ordinary search crawlers do not reach, then assembled the results into one profile page: images, telephone entries, addresses, social network accounts, documents with the name in them.

It grew fast in the German-speaking web and then across Europe, and by the time PagesJaunes bought it in March 2010 it was doing forty million unique visitors a month across twelve country sites. The price was never disclosed. The buyer was a yellow pages company that had watched its printed book turn into a liability and wanted to own the online version of looking someone up.

The thing worth saying about the product is that it did not break in. Every piece of information it showed you was already public and already indexed somewhere. The invention was the assembly, and the assembly is what people found unbearable.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how the name search worked ~

Scattered facts are safe. A photograph from someone else's party, a phone number sitting in a directory from 2003: each one on its own is harmless, and finding both by hand takes an afternoon and a reason. 123people did that in two seconds for anyone who could spell your name, and put it on one screen with your face at the top.

The business ran on advertising sold across those twelve domains along with affiliate deals with directories and record providers. The company also sold the antidote to its own product: a Webcleaner service that promised to get pictures and posts taken off the web for you, and a monitor that watched your Facebook profile for exposure. Selling the search and the cleanup from the same office is a business model with a certain nerve to it.

~ the hamburg ruling ~

People search engines were a genuine political fight in the German-speaking web around 2009. Yasni and 123people were the two names everyone argued about, and the argument was whether aggregation of public data is itself an act that needs consent.

On 16 June 2010 the Landgericht Hamburg answered, in case 325 O 448/09, that 123people.de was allowed to display freely accessible photographs. The reasoning was uncomfortable and hard to argue with: if you had not blocked the image from search engines and the page hosting it was built to be found, that counted as consent to it being found. A further Hamburg judgment in April 2011 confirmed the same for photographs republished from other sites. The law had spoken. Nobody felt better.

~ what the domain sells now ~

The end was quiet. The Austrian company had renamed itself Yelster Digital in 2012 and turned its attention to 123pages, a business listings search launched in France in January 2012 and in Austria that April, which is the product its French parent actually wanted. The people search was taken down permanently on 31 March 2014 with no announcement anyone recorded.

The domain went to OG Media US LLC of Miami and came back as a celebrity news aggregator, which is what 123people.com serves today: a page of gossip headlines sitting on an address that used to answer questions about you. The search itself did not need to be shut down to disappear. Facebook had already put everyone behind a login, and the crawlable real-name web that made the product possible has been closing ever since.

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