Updated
So which Silicon Valley venture firm will dare touch Ucloo?
Ucloo is a year-old Chinese people search engine, and there are many things not to like about this site. First, check out the logo. What does it remind you of? At least they switched the colors of the first three letters (it is red/yellow/blue, instead of blue/red/yellow). See the page comparisons below, with Google, and with Baidu.
Chief executive Randy Ding tells VentureBeat that Ucloo has already indexed 90 million personal profiles for its database, making it the largest people search engine so far. Spock, the ambitious people search engine we profiled here plans to launch with 100 million. But Ucloo is adding between 10,000 and 100,000 profiles a day, Ding tells us, so it will zoom past Spock within a few weeks. It is focused on China now, but is expanding to cover the Chinese community abroad, including in Taiwan, US and Canada. It wants to launch an English version after it raises venture capital — and is now beginning to reach out to Sand Hill Road.
It’s eerily comprehensive. It wants to list everything it can find about you, including your name, birthday, contact information, education, work background, pictures, online activity and reputation — even court records. Check out this profile below, of “LoveGirl,” which shows her Gmail and MSN accounts, among other things. So what happens when it crawls your information, finds out what sites you’ve watched online, who you’ve corresponded with, etc, and you can’t appeal to U.S courts to take it down? Yikes.
It wants to 1) let people search for information on other people, 2) let companies check employee background and references, 3) let companies check other companies’ reputation and employees, and 4) lets a user check a company’s background. There’s the additional unanswered question about what China’s government would use it for.
Update: VentureBeat contacted three plugged-in sources in the Chinese tech community, and heard back from each of them that they hadn’t heard of Ucloo until we brought it to their attention. One of them tried it out, and found it useful. She did some research and reports that the current version of Ucloo launched in Sept. after settling some legal issues concerning its data sources, including allegations of theft. In addition to the material we mentioned above, Ucloo even collects your IMs and posts on online forums (so-called bulletin boards in China). Our correspondent found that most media coverage in China about Ucloo is negative, so the commenters below are off-base when they suggest VentureBeat is anti-Chinese. Ucloo’s Ding attended the recent Web 2.0 conference in SF.
Ding, meanwhile, has since responded to some of our criticisms on privacy. We will not edit his remarks. He is Chinese, and so applaud his effort to correspond with us in English.
Ding:
We have the function of “It’s me”, after we verify (by the email address which we send from our database or ask them upload the ID) the person who is listing on Ucloo, the user can edit his/her profile and add/remove some of information.
VentureBeat:
So I can remove anything I want, so that Ucloo won’t have anything about me?
Ding:
1. User can remove SOME of information which is included home address, home phone number or some of other directly contact information and can ask system to transfer all connection request through ucloo.
2. Personal education and work experience can be added new information by the owner, but can’t be removed.
3. Web reference is an hyperlink depend on source website, Ucloo cached to check.
4. Business membership can see all information whatever it has been edited or not.Also, next version which will be launched the end of this year, we are going to change our logo NOT like Google.
10 Comments
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Baal Young said:
What about my privacy and information accuracy?
I live in China and I don’t know this website at least.
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Adam G said:
And venturebeat’s logo is original?
Matt’s reviews of chinese startups are consistently negative. And no matter what the startups does, he finds a way to bring the Chinese government into the story. I’m wondering if its ignorance or xenophobia.
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Rulepark said:
Accuracy of the info? China have the biggest chinese community, if it really can find the person, it is pretty eerie. Nothing is hidden then. A tool allows by the China who encourage cencorship in the internet, that is not internet freedom, afterall.
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John Doe said:
Dude, first off, you commenters seriously need to sharpen your modern lingo skills. I am still trying to piece your comments together.
Second, anytime you have a website providing free information on individuals without their consent, you are probably going to be disliked, especially by democratic bloggers and socialists governments.
Third, I follow the venturebeat blog thoroughly and I have not seen any biased views by the author.
In short, good luck monetizing your product and I would suggest you refer to the invisible case study on Zabba search.
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David G. said:
Does Ucloo generate controversy and raise eyebrows of some democratic bloggers and socialists governments? U bet!
Does Ucloo’s business model (if anything that will make money for the site) make sense? Most definitely!
Web/Internet identity/reputation is a field that sooner or later will be touched and torched. Besides, all information summarized about a person is readily google available. I do not see why democratic bloggers and socialists governments should jump up and down against a service putting those information together and easily being searchable. Of course, Ucloo can definitely do more to ensure accuracy and legitimacy of information, and truly bring SN and sustainable revenure into its BM.
Matt is actually helping the company get funded. Already, it created BUZZ, good or bad, among venturebeat users and maybe caught some sour eyes of sleepless VCs…
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Rational Beaver said:
Meh. If it uses a spider to gather the data then it can be manipulated. All you have to do is change the data sources which are, presumably, things that you or your company put online in the first place.
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Calvin said:
In a market where verifying your identity (clear and accessible credit histories, academic transcripts, criminal records, employment records, etc…) is a more urgent challenge than hiding who you are, Ucloo could actually be a boon to individuals and users. The key will be the opt-in, opt-out ability that users will have. Just because the data is already out there, doesn’t mean that making it more searchable isn’t a sea change. That’s the company’s value prop after all.
If privacy rights are your primary concern, you might want to re-consider a)living in China, b)investing in China.
And if I’m not mistaken, quite a few American jurists (ahem, Supremes) take a view that there is no fundamental right to privacy ether.
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Leon said:
People search engine (PSE) is a wonderful service if, and only if, the profiled individuals’ privacy is fully respected. I applaud Ucloo for allowing the profiled individuals to remove their contact information. But that is not enough.
Failure in addressing privacy concerns may in the long run limit PSE’s potential. To be successful, a PSE should encourage people to post their profiles by respecting their will and privacy instead of making them feel fearful of the service.
If I want to search John Smith or Ming Wang (a popular Chinese name), how many of them will show up? I suppose if you don’t know much about someone already, it can still be difficult to find any info about that person.
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Lisa H said:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Interactive Search Engine Connects Consumers with Businesses
FREDERICK, Md., November 19, 2008 – InverSearch (http://www.inversearch.com) is an inverse search engine that connects consumers with businesses. Individuals and businesses simply post natural-language inquiries, and the system immediately distributes their inquiries to registered businesses interested in responding to their requests. Users can post and respond to inquiries locally, worldwide or anywhere in between.
InverSearch allows people to quickly and easily find things based on their exact criteria. InverSearch users also have accounts in which to manage their inquiries and responses. The responses users receive are relevant results from self-identified sources. The inquiries businesses receive are credible sales leads.
An inverse search is simpler and faster than conducting a traditional Web search and does not require users to search by, or businesses to bid on, keywords or key phrases. InverSearch business users control their own advertising budgets and achieve the highest possible advertising conversion rates while connecting with potential customers.
InverSearch is immune to click fraud and the problems associated with pay-per-click advertising. Business advertising is delivered in response to consumer inquiries, not in advance of them. InverSearch utilizes a patent-pending pay-per-response model whereby business users pay only for the number of responses they make to consumer inquiries rather than for the number of hits they receive.
InverSearch provides businesses with the most credible, cost-effective means to obtain business leads, and gives consumers the easiest, most reliable way to receive relevant search results. Since businesses already respond to consumer inquiries that come from conventional business advertising, InverSearch easily replaces the online advertising businesses are already doing.
About InverSearch, LLC
InverSearch is a privately held company specializing in the development of software to provide everyone a real alternative to scouring the Web and pay-per-click advertising. Those interested in searching an entirely new way can visit InverSearch at http://www.inversearch.com. InverSearch was launched on June 23, 2008.
Contact:
Joseph Cibula
InverSearch, LLC
jcibula@inversearch.com
http://www.inversearch.com###
3 Trackbacks
3:59 am
Chinese Search - Look familiar? « Technically Speaking said:
[...] Now what makes Ucloo a bit scary? It is adding between 10,000 to 100,000 people daily to it’s database. It’s search spider is very through, and will soon, according to Ucloo’s CEOÂ Randy Ding, will surpass another site that is about launch (Spock) which you can read more about here. [...]
6:55 am
★ ★ ★ rocketsociety.net ISSN 1816-2207 | © blundstone osterberger » social engineering said:
[...] there’s an article on venturebeat featuring a chinese “people search engine” where you can look up personal data from internet users such as their contact data, their lives, do a background check, etc. woo. yay. seriously, this is threatening one’s privacy to an advanced level. [...]
12:13 pm
VentureBeat » The rush to people search: Viadeo, ZoomInfo, Yahoo China, Spock said:
[...] – Yahoo China has just released a new version of its search, Yahoo.cn, that includes a people search, though it’s focused on celebrities. Yahoo uses information extraction technology and semantic analysis to create a Flash-based map of relationships, along with explanations of why they are related to and the sources of the information. China Web 2.0 provides an example of Jack Ma. Another Chinese company, Koowo, reportedly got $5.5 million for among other things, a similar mapping of Chinese stars. However, the downside is that these offerings often appear to be inaccurate. Finally, there’s Ucloo, the Chinese people search, that last we heard was looking to raise a round of capital. [...]