From TechCrunch
Find Everyone You Can’t Google Or Facebook With YC’s Ark People Search
By Josh Constine
Google and Facebook can’t help you find which of your friends are single, or live in New York and like Radiohead, but Ark can. Today Y Combinator-backed Ark.com sails into private beta in hopes of becoming the best place on the web to do people searches. With a variety of layer-able filters, Ark lets you search through public profiles and the private data of your friends across Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and other networks. It’s also got filter sets for easily discovering old classmates and new business contacts....
After trying a few other ideas, Ark’s founders [and School of Information Ph.D. students] Patrick Riley and Yiming Liu tell me “we imagined what would Google and Facebook build together if they weren’t at war. Someone needed to be Switzerland and build a search engine on top of all the social networks that’s completely remodeled for people looking for each other.” The two-person company is running on a $250,000 seed round from Y Combinator, Yuri Milner, SV Angel, and Andreessen Horowitz.
Riley tells me he sees little competition in dedicated people search other than from data scrapers like Rapleaf. While it’s only for finding people, — it leaves connecting with them up to you, Ark could disrupt bloated, clumsy, and expensive sites designed for seeking old school pals or local singles. Ark still needs to speed up how quickly it can crunch someone’s data after they register and the spartan design could use some polish, but the service works well for being fresh out of alpha....