Oh no! Public information is public!

brian_d_foy on 2004-09-26T16:21:25

Ovid writes about Eliyon that tracks who worked for whom.

I've seen this before, and I'm still not impressed. It's not as good as Google, certainly.

When I search for my name, I get 2 out of 20 that are actually me. Both of those come from companies I started, not any that hired me. Their sources are rather limited, too. It looks like they actually track very little, based on the sources of that information. They need some Google Web Services kung-fu.

Despite my O'Reilly weblog profile and my personal web page, with both say I work for Stonehenge, it doesn't show up.

Randal's results are a little better, but still don't mention Stonehenge.

Not even a company search found any "Stonehenge Consulting" employees.

Apparently they are only looking at news-type content, and doing very simple lexical analysis with very simple patterns.

I smell a business plan and a lot of know-nothing coders.


It isn't very good...

zatoichi on 2004-09-26T18:51:02

I went through about 10 pages of my name but none of them are me.

Email addresses and resumes

iburrell on 2004-09-27T01:33:50

Analyzing news stories would only expose public relationships. A couple of the companies I worked for were fairly stealthy. The only publicly visible relationship is postings with my email address at the now expired domain.

They are also pulling information from resumes. They have me in the database, along with others with my name, from my resume. Of course, someone could just Google to find it.