Globalize Yourself

It doesn’t take much to Globalize Yourself – all you have to do is register with WikiWorldBook the Global Address Book and you can be found by anyone on the planet via the major Search Engines like Google.

Not only that, but you don’t have to reveal any of your precious personal data in order to allow old friends and colleagues to find you and get back in contact – there is a message gateway that allows you to keep your email hidden whilst allowing them to contact you without having to register.

We think it is very important that people who want to contact you shouldn’t have to register themselves if they don’t want to – likewise we make it easy to leave our service. We believe that we are here to serve people like you and not the other way around.

Personalities like Anna Song, Catherine Edgington, Justin Hayward and Tina Sieber, Andrew Sanders, Stuart Bathgate have signed up as well as journalists and lots of ordinary people like me, Ben!

Who is Googling You?

If you want the answer to the question who's Googling you, you need to register with a free website like WikiWorldBook, which is a People Search engine with Global Address Book.

Essentially, the service enables you to create a profile which is easily found by anyone looking for you using Google or another search engine. You are sent a Search Alert email if someone Googles you and clicks through to your profile. You should be able to see the geographical location of the searcher, their IP address, what business or organization they are at if that's where they are based, the actual search engine and the keywords used to find you. You can see a screenshot below in the previous blog.

Some people have said that this is controversial because its breaching peoples privacy. Here at WikiWorldBook , we think its only supposedly controversial because its a new technology that most people aren't aware of yet. If its alright that employers or organizations like Universities can search on the web for information about employees and students, then maybe it's alright if those people know that someone is looking for them - especially if they are trying to find out something negative about them. We think this helps redress the balance.

Find Out When You’ve Been Googled.

Every day, around 50 million people are Googled by people or organisations. Have you ever wondered if someone has been Googling you?


Well, wonder no more because, with Search Alert, now you can know.


This works in a very simple way:-

• When you register with us, you create a unique page with your profile on it (which might show as little as your name).
  

• Because we are a “big” enough site, your profile page will be ranked high in any Google results – perhaps even number one – unless you have a very common name.
  

• Anyone looking for you will therefore easily see your WikiWorldBook profile page and want to view it.
  

• When they view that page, we capture some of their details, which allows you to see what time and what day they Googled you and where they Googled you from, which we plot on a Google Map.
  

• Every time you are Googled, we save these details in a report for you so you can keep track of how often it is happening to you. What’s more, you can choose if you want an email notification of every time it happens!

WikiWorldBook – And Why You Need To Be On It.

The internet age has fundamentally changed society and business. Half our lives are now controlled by the mechanism that is known as the web, whether we personally engage with it or not. We can engage with it for our personal banking or social activities, like sending email, dating, sharing photos, booking holidays or flights, or communicating with friends via various social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace etc). And for business, like business banking, company websites, email etc. And if you don’t engage with it at all, you are still there, in friends blogs, in company literature, in Government documentation etc. Essentially, people’s personal and business lives are becoming more transparent and they have a choice about whether they ignore this irreversible trend or engage with it in order to exert a degree of control over it.

Managing Your Identity

The effect that this has now had is that when people want to find out about someone else, they now Google them – that is to say that they carry out a search for that person using a search engine. “You’ve been Googled” is now part of our everyday vocabulary for good reason, because it is a highly effective way of finding out about someone very quickly. That is why, if you are at all concerned about your identity you should be concerned about what people can find out about you from the first few pages of a Google search using your name.

No one can prevent what results show up in the results of a Google search, but you can make sure that one of the very first results that jumps out at someone searching for you is one that you have planted for them to find. That is where WikiWorldBook comes in.

WikiWorldBook is a free online Address Book where you can create your own profile in order to tell people what you want them to know about yourself. It is an open site, so all the information on your profile page shows up in the search engine results. Its benefits include:-

• Be easily found – via search engine searches.

• Be easily contacted – without having to reveal your contact details (we hide your email address). Anyone contacting you uses our internal messaging system which then generates an email to your email account, so the message sender never sees your email address (in effect an “email gateway”).

• Manage Your identity – via a profile you create, which can tell people as little as your name or as much as you want them to know about yourself, including your interests, the industry in which you work, your position at work, your website address, even your life philosophy.

• We make it easy for people, like old friends and colleagues, to contact you by not requiring that they register with us before they message you (we are one of the very few sites that allow this).

• We have a new powerful spam filter which means that you should not receive any spam at all – therefore you are only contacted by the people you want to hear from.
  
  

WikiWorldBook also has its own people search engine which searches the web to provide highly filtered results for people searches which are broken down into different segments, to make it easier to digest the results if there are many of them. The website also offers the ability to Trace old friends and relatives, read or create interesting blogs, a discussion forum and an expanding business and product directory, where you can find and make reviews.

Conclusion

In conclusion, if you want to control what people read about you before they read something else elsewhere then provide them with an easy source of reference using WikiWorldBook. If you want to be easily found and contacted without having to reveal your contact details, use WikiWorldBook.


See the WikiWorldBook home page here

See a profile here

See the Google results for that profile here

People Search and Monthly WorldWide Search Volume

In their latest press release on the total amount of Searches carried out worldwide, comScore have calculated that over 61 billion search engine queries were conducted from over 750 million searchers.

As a reflection of growing Search trends, the study found that more than 750 million people age 15 and older – or 95 percent of the worldwide Internet audience – conducted 61 billion searches worldwide in August, an average of more than 80 searches per searcher (although this varies from country to country). It thereby also estimates the total global internet user base over 15 at just under 790 million users.

In terms of People Search as a proportion of the overall volume of Search use, it has been estimated by some commentators that around 2 billion searches per month are specifically on people, whilst up to 30% of all searches are in some way people-related.


If you would like to conduct a people search, you can do so here.

Free People Search Engines

If you are looking for someone in particular, there are a number of free people search engines you can use for a people search which provide highly filtered results, so you don't have to spend time picking through millions of normal search engine results:

• WikiWorldBook
• Yahoo People Search
• Pipl
• Wink
• Spock
• PeekYou
• Zaba Search
• ZoomInfo.
  

Tracing People

Remember that WikiWorldBook also has Trace facility whereby you input the name of the person you are looking for and it generates a result for that person on all the Search Engines – then if the person who is the target of the “trace” sees the result (or even one of their acquaintances), then they will know someone is searching for them and can respond. Its a bit like travellers putting a note on a noticeboard in a busy cafe used by other travellers so that people passing can see it - in this case the search engines are acting like the cafe as a place to post your "missing" notice.

WikiWorldBook - Our Mission

WikiWorldBook is a project to create the world’s first free online global address book through the participation of the world’s online community. It aims to connect everyone on the planet through open mass collaboration, in much the same way as mass collaboration built Wikipedia. We believe that there is no greater creative force than people coming together positively for a single purpose.

• Search & find people on the web with our Free People Search.

• Be found by old friends and colleagues

• Search Alert - Find out when someone has Googled you

• Use our Trace facilty to harness the power of the web to find old friends and relatives

• Manage your online reputation

• Use our Directory to find products and services, businesses and organizations

• Even Blog!

http://wikiworldbook.com/