Whozat?, The People Search Engine, Beats Google; Recognized Among 100 Hottest Start-Ups on Earth

August 21, 2007; 01:54 AM

Altadena, CA (PRWEB) August 20, 2007 -- Whozat?, The People Search Engine , was recognized by the prestigious TechCrunch20 competition among the 100 hottest new start-ups on the planet. In a blind study of the relevance of search results for ordinary people, Whozat? beat every other search engine by a large margin.

"In all, we received nearly 700 applications from 26 different countries, making for an extremely competitive screening process," wrote Heather Harde, CEO of TechCrunch, arguably the most influential technology blog in the world.

Whozat? works like a one-stop-shop aggregator that allows users to find other people in social networks, blogs, photo and video sites and on the WWW. A blind evaluation of the relevance of people search results for Whozat?, Google, Yahoo, Ask, and three other people search engines threw the following preliminary but statistically significant results for a list of ordinary people compiled by a third party: Whozat? beat every other search engine, yielding the most relevant results, as evaluated by the searcher, almost three times as often as all generic search engines and more than five times as often as any other people search engine.

Whozat? achieves this through a combination of broader reach and proprietary algorithms.

Whozat? also boasts a people-centric UI, machine vision to find photos of the people you are looking for, automatic tag extraction to describe a person at a glance, and "It'zat" and "Not zat" feedback buttons that allow searchers to tell Whozat? whether a person, URL or tag is relevant or not to their search, immediately customizing results accordingly. These interactive features make searches with Whozat? a conversation rather than a one-way street. Whozat? even allows searchers to specify the age ("'zat old?"), location ("where 'zat?") and/or sex of the person sought, and finds related people, too. Unlike sites which mostly contain information provided by users, Whozat? is a true search engine, finding information and photos of people without any prior instruction needed.

"I found a friend I hadn't found for about 30 years. How fun!" wrote Mary E. Benson, a teacher from Glenwood Springs, Colorado, after her first experience with Whozat?.

Whozat? is currently in private Beta -users may sign up at http://www.whozat.com.

About Whozat?:
Whozat? was founded in a Southern California garage by Alex Bäcker and Marzia Polito, two Ph.D.s out of Caltech. Dr. Polito, originally from Florence, Italy, is a mathematician trained in Pisa and in Caltech's Computational Vision Lab, and spent four years as a Sr. Research Scientist at Intel. Dr. Bäcker, who was born in Argentina and has degrees from MIT and Caltech, is also the founder of Adapt Technologies , a firm that optimizes advertisers' campaigns in major search engines such as Google and Yahoo, QLess , a company that eliminates the need for standing in line and was a finalist for the prestigious SuperNova 2007, and REPcloud , a Facebook application which allows people to discover the reputation of others and search for people by reputation, whose user base is growing at 40-150% per day, placing it among the most viral applications in Facebook.

Contact:
Alex Bäcker and Marzia Polito, Founders
Whozat? The People Search Engine
Tel. +1 (224) 293-0369