People search engine like Google but for people
Makeomatic have teamed up with the smartest people search engine ever
Anna Amineva 
A key activity of Makeomatic in the past year has been our involvement in people search engine. Today, we would like to show you briefly what this product is, and how Makeomatic have contributed to it. This is the first in a series of blog posts detailing our involvement with peoplefinders and showcasing our solutions to their questions and problems.
People search engine
At first glance this product is a search engine, but that would hardly do it justice, because it can do so much more than your average search engine. First of all, it’s more specialised: it’s peoplefinders (and did you know that 30 percent of all Google searches are for people?), but it does so much more than just give you a list of websites where a name appears. This platform specifically searches more than 50 social networks, and it can connect the dots for you. It processes, aggregates and sorts the data it finds.
Therefore, when you’re searching for your old classmate Sam, wouldn’t it be great if the search engine returned a full metaprofile, with their Facebook likes, Instagram pics, LinkedIn info and latest tweets all in one place? Of course, that’s not an easy thing to do – this engine has to figure out that this Sam Miller on Facebook is the same person as that Sam Miller on Google+, for example. This requires some nifty algorithms working for you behind the scenes, and this is where Makeomatic enter the picture.
Distributed content analysis and Data Mining solutions
In the past year, Makeomatic have provided a good deal of the physical and computational infrastructure behind the search engine with Nodejs and Elasticsearch technologies, to allow the system to run as smoothly and quickly as possible. We migrated their system from AWS to in-house Data Center with more than 100 servers running day and night. Elasticsearch made it possible to process 100,000 parallel search requests while keeping the search speed below 500 milliseconds. We also integrated CI (Continuous Integration) into the search engine’s everyday workflow. And not to forget, we put our brains behind data mining, helping to aggregate the people data scattered across a wide range of social sites.
Social networking tools
While a general browser-based search engine is not online yet, this platform has published several products that use its database. Makeomatic made a mail client available as an app, and we developed a browser plugin for your e-mail account. Both share one unique feature: they link your mail contacts with their social network information. Not to forget, we also contributed to REST API, an interface to access our database and to conduct searches, making it even more efficient.
Using the people search engine
You can download Mail client, which is free, to help you organise your mail more efficiently and to link up your mail contacts with your social network contacts. In addition, there are a range of corporate customers, who have integrated the people search engine’s API into their systems. Imagine you had a new customer or a potential new employee — wouldn’t it be nice to have aggregate information about them at your fingertips, rather than spending a lot of time trying to google that information? Or imagine you’re company interested in targeted advertising – with the people profiles this project builds you stand a much better chance that your message also reaches the intended recipient.
Looking forward
It is clear as daylight that social networks have become a customary part of their daily routine for billions of people. Every second they are gaining more and more users, sharing their views, opinions, likes and dislikes and inevitably enriching the quality and the quantity of unprecedented amount of valuable data, and this is one of the biggest challenges of the present time. Facing it is only possible with the help of a powerful tool designed and created by the most up-to-date breakthrough technologies like AngularJS and NodeJS.
In today’s post we wanted to give you an idea of what the people search engine is and how we at Makeomatic contributed to making this project what it is. Later on, there will be a series of blog posts explaining in greater detail what Makeomatic have done to make this product fruitful.