

Ark (YC W12) launches a modern people search engine - priley
http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/25/ark-people-search/

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sciurus
Am I the only one who feels that any kind of search engine that requires
creating an account is a non-starter?

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prawn
Don't underestimate the power of stalking to encourage people though.

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useflyer
another data broker to add to the list on safeShepherd.com

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evoloution
Hi guys, really nice work.

I am really into the tip of the iceberg idea for the website.

One question to the developers that I am sure it is in many people's minds: 1)
I sign up 2) U use my login credentials to access the apis 3) U print the
results on my screen 4) U save the "business card" of the person I searched
for without his consent. And now the million dollar question. Do you for any
reason give FULL access to this business card to: a) a person that has partial
access to my contact for example linkein connection but not facebook friend?
b) to any other person or company that has no connection whatsoever, now or IN
THE FUTURE?

In other words do you provide details that are not publicly available to
people that have no connection?

Sorry for the long post but I am a little bit concerned about privacy...

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priley
Great question. So, there are two parts of Ark:

1) Massive index that spans across all the world's social networks. This
publicly accessible data is normalized, cleansed, etc.

2) You can make a "private" index of just your friends. This never goes
outside of your own private index. That data remains there and is not added to
the massive index. It is incrementally updated, so if people are no longer
your friends (bummer!) they are no longer in your private index.

No one gets full access. Otherwise we lose all our integrity. I hope that
helps.. and thanks again for the question.

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ayanb
question to the founders - how did you get this TREMENDOUS domain name?

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btucker
I'd be fascinated to hear this story too. I'd think that domain would be worth
more than most ycombinator startups could afford.

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omarish
priley must have amazing negotiation skills.

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stfu
Or patience. If you linger around domain auction platforms and forums enough
and are willing to invest you can get lucky on a relatively consistent basis.

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priley
It was a little of both. ;) Hey... everyone... I just wanted to thank you for
all your comments about our new search engine! This community has such great
insight and I just really appreciate the support with Ark. It has been an
_exhausting_ 45 days of coding and designing, but encouragement like this
makes it all worth while.

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joejohnson
_Google and Facebook can’t help you find which of your friends are single, or
live in New York and like Radiohead..._

Really? I think that it can.

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priley
I think what he means which of your friends are single AND live in New York
AND like Radiohead.

Search only gets interesting when you learn how to power search, and Ark is
that power people search.

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stfu
"First name Emily + birthday in March + Studied at NYU = That ridiculous girl
from New York you met during her birthday party at the bar last night"

sounds like a great addition to my cyber stalker toolbag. These cross-network
profiling is really one of these areas which haven't been covered that much
yet, except maybe by intelligence services. Looks like an interesting project
to watch.

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mindstab
What ever happend to greplin? weren't they also kind of going to solve this?
They were in the news a ton until they weren't.

But yeah, we need this. Even Facebook's search has been nerfed compared to
where it was years ago. It is a colossal pain, all the data is there but no
one wants to organize it

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priley
Greplin is _awesome_ and Daniel's team is super impressive. But they focus and
index on all your private data like messages, emails, etc. We are trying to
improve the 30% of internet searches online that are people-related. I love
how you say Facebook's search has been nerfed.. I may borrow that for the Demo
Day preso. :)

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mindstab
:) please do. It was. It was always a bit limited but there used to be a
decent set of controls. Filter by gender, age, likes, institution, even dating
status I believe. Now practically nothing. I think name and possibly sub
filter by group. That's it. It's pathetic, and pretty much useless for
anything other then finding people in your list by name faster than scrolling
down the page.

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piggity
I for one don't like this, and hope that there is an opt-out feature.

Just because my information is somewhat public in several places (not
Facebook) does not mean I want it aggregated and data mined for commercial and
advertising purposes.

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vasco
It's my opinion that once you put information on the internet it is public
domain and anyone who wishes to mine it is free to do so. The burden of
keeping yourself private lies with you.

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koopajah
I agree with you, the problem here is that being connected on G+, facebook or
linkedin to people going on Ark, now Ark will have a lot of info on me that
was only available partly to each website. This kind of bothers me.

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bennyfreshness
Very interesting pivot. They were doing an affiliate sales system where
rewards from your purchases go to nonprofits of your choosing. They were my
startup's #1 competitor. I wonder why the pivot?

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goronbjorn
I'm detecting at least a small bit of influence from Facebook in the UI.

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priley
Pretty fancy detective work there. :) Our beta users felt more "confident"
with this design, data layout, probably because they were used to a similar
mental model with FB.

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goronbjorn
That's interesting. I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with it.
Facebook says that they change the font of their site to match the system font
of the current user because they want it to "feel like a system application".
I guess the analogy is for Ark to "feel like a social network application" by
having similar styling. IDK just thinking out loud.

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Herald_MJ
For anyone interested, the closest thing to this around at the moment (that I
have come across) is <http://pipl.com> , and it's actually pretty good.

~~~
priley
I agree.. but again, it starts with a "name" input field. Many of the
interesting searches are where you know qualities of people, but no idea about
their name. It's x10 more powerful than pipl.

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evoxed
I see they're indexing renren– any chance for mixi indexing as well?

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dsrguru
Indexing mixi makes a lot more sense than renren since there's no way a site
that indexes facebook and google plus will be viewable in China.

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priley
Great point! Just as Google first thought they were badass with "1 million
pages" indexed, we realize we are just getting started. We'll add more social
networks in the future. :)

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K2h
It is about time someone tackles the problem of so many closed disperate
people data sets and find a way to merge them!

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cantbecool
What if Google and Facebook block access to their APIs? This seems like a
possibility if Ark gains traction.

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epikur
If it gained traction, wouldn't a Google or Facebook acquisition be even more
of a possibility?

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moylan
and which ever one loses the acquisition bid will block the winner

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benologist
That's the winner's problem.

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dm8
Congrats to Patrick and Yiming on the launch. It looks awesome and adresses
real problem.

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newman314
I want to know what Ark is doing in terms of privacy and opt-out?

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prayag
Patrick and team are amazing. All the best with Ark and penguins.

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alagu
This is godsend for recruiters.

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kmfrk
Wow, such a great idea, and its presentation video is phenomenal. I don't see
how this could not succeed.

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suking
I wish there was an API where I could input as much info as I had
array("firstName"=>"John","lastName"=>"Doe","zip"=>"12345") for example and it
returns info on as many matches that go with the input and includes
occupation, birth date, relatives, etc. That would be awesome...

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sumukh1
FullContact does something similiar. <http://developer.fullcontact.com/>

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suking
No occupation or it would be pretty good, but that's mainly what I want. Does
LinkedIn have an API that this would work with?

