snitch.name was originally a tool I developed because I was tired of having to search in various place to find information about someone I met. It hasn’t been designed to be fancy, but solves a real world problem until the people that build social services decide on some profile searching APIs. Until that time comes snitch.name is the best tool for searching for people’s profiles on social services.
I’ll try to incorporate more user requested features, so drop me a line if you’d like to have a new search provider added or have some new functionality in mind.
Plugin
You can search with snitch.name directly from your browser’s search box using the OpenSearch specification! This is the box that sits right from your address bar. Both IE7 and Firefox support it
FAQ
Do I need an account on these social sites?
In most cases these sites reveal little or no information to users that don’t have an account so it would be wise to get an account. It is free anyway 🙂
Why can’t I just use Google?
There are several advantages over a plain Google search! Some of them are:
- There are several social sites that are not indexed by Google at all or in a very limited way. As has Tim O’Reilly agreed on: “Social sites like Facebook/Flickr grow exponentially without being indexed by Google”.
- Depending on your privileges to the various social sites, you’ll always get the maximum information that you are allowed to get. For example if you are in someone’s network in Facebook you’ll get more information in snitch.name than you would get directly from a Google search.
- Google will not necessarily give higher ranking to results that are “people profiles”, so you get a whole bunch of results from mailing lists, forums, etc. that might have little value to you.
- With snitch.name you get all the results expanded in your page so you can print them all at once and have them available
when you are away from your computer.
Why everything loads inside the browser?
This way you access the social sites using your own credential and get authorized for the maximum amount of information you are allowed to. Many social sites don’t have public/open APIs (eg. LinkedIn) and even the ones that do have would need you to authenticate again. This could be very impractical. With snitch.name the cookies you have stored in your browser already do all the work to authenticate you.
Is it better than other people-search-services?
Try yourself to see how superior snitch.name is!
Many thanks to Christos Stathis, Fotis Stamatlopoulos, Kostas Troulos & Panagiotis Astithas, for their early feedback.
Dio Synodinos 
Excellent tool!. I did a search about me and I foudn me in several places 🙂 I’ll bookmark it, nice work Dionysis.
I just came across snitch.name through friendfeed. Great idea and implementation.
I’m dreaming of something similar for Greek newspapers’ search engines. A page where one enters his keywords and the query is passed over to all online greek papers. Even better if it could support each one’s syntax (different wild chars, boolean operators, etc.), and advances search options (chronological period, etc.)
I am using Firefox Search Sidebar to achieve as much as possible of this, but it’s an abandoned project, and it hardly works in Firefox 3.x…
Nice work! Well done, once more.
@Stazybο
First of all thanks for the kind words 🙂
Although some of the features you mention could be a bit hard to develop, it is technically possible to do a newspaper meta-search service using the snitch.name paradigm. I’m not sure though how the newspapers would feel about that and especially their oversized legal departments 🙂
BTW you can also use snitch.name from the Firefox sidebar (http://snitch.name/plugin.html) or using the Facebook app (http://apps.facebook.com/snitchdotname).
Well, I cannot see any reasons to your legal concerns. Even as it is now, with different frames in a single page, original resource content is displayed and page hits are recorded. But you could make it even more straightforward and perhaps more practical in this case, if search results from each paper were directed to different windows.
I suppose that indeed you would be sending, not stealing, traffic to them with such a tool.
PS. I was wrong. I first saw snitch.name back when Yorgos posted about it. Actually, it’s already in my search bar, as a search plugin.
snitch.name on the Los Angeles Times : http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-cover-privacy16-2009aug16,0,5663794.story