New comer to the people search game 123people.com is a Austrian based startup that is looking to provide a new take on the competitive people search market with a European focus.

There’s no shortage of wannabes in this space. Spock, Wink, Zoominfo, WikiYou and PeekYou are a few companies we’ve reviewed previously. 123people.com joins that list, but there are a few differences that are worth mentioning.

123people.com is primarily a data aggregator, but unlike some of its competitors it goes one step further by aggregating publicly available phone numbers and email addresses for every search result. It’s not perfect, and it has better results for European focused searches, but this will improve with time.

In addition 123people also aggregates videos, photos, tags and comments from “hundreds of international sites” including Facebook, Hi5, Xing, YouTube, Last.fm and studiVZ. Users can claim, tag, vote and comment on aggregated profiles on 123people.com.

We have invites to the private beta of 123people.com to give away to TechCrunch readers. The first 150 people to email privatebeta@123people.com will get an invite code in return, and if you are one of the 150, let us know what you think of 123people.com in the comments.

As if the more than 20 billion Web pages out there aren’t enough, a new startup coming out of stealth mode today called Attendi has come up with a new twist on “people search.” This is not to be confused with the type of people search that Facebook is getting into (actually searching for people—see also Spock, Wink, Zoominfo, WikiYou and PeekYou), or the type of people-powered search results that Mahalo, Wikiasari, and others are exploring (also known as social search). Actually, Attendi could more aptly be called chat search because it wants to search what’s in people’s heads as expressed through online chats. Attendi is launching at DEMO fall.

Attendi is half a social network, and half a knowledge database. Here’s how it’s supposed to work. Members, known as “Attendis,” will create profiles on the site describing their areas of expertise, hobbies, and interests, as well as adding links to their blogs, social networks, or simply Websites they identify with. The site, which opens in beta today, dynamically creates tags that define what each person knows and cares about (they can also add their own tags). It is built on top of the Lucene open-source search engine, and the Jabber instant-messaging protocol.

When someone searches for a topic on Attendi, what comes back as results are profiles of other “Attendis” whose tags match the search request. And if they happen to be online at the moment, even on another IM system, the other person can initiate a chat discussion with one of them to ask questions about that topic. “Attendi will just be a way to broker your availability,” says CEO Drew Rayman. Every chat is archived, indexed, and becomes fodder for future search results.

Attendi is based in New York City, and Rayman is also the founder of an interactive ad agency called i33. He plans on selling search ad sponsorships based on Attendi topics, as well as a live chat ad unit that only pops up when a company’s online customer service rep is at the ready to do a hard sell through IM. It’s that kind of in-your-face advertising, though, that might drive people away from an IM-centric search engine and never give it a second chance.

Making topic-specific IMs searchable is certainly a novel way to create a knowledge database. But Attendi faces a huge hurdle in getting anybody to actually use its system. What’s the incentive? There is no existing network of super-smart Attendis anyone would want to tap into. One way around this chicken-and-egg problem, though, would be to take advantage of free advice that tens of thousands, if not millions, of people are already giving away for free online in the form of comments that people leave on blogs. There is no easy way to search across those. (Startups like Big Swerve, which was in the TechCrunch40 Demo Pit, are already onto this).

Bloggers today install search boxes from Google or Eurekster to allow readers to search through their posts. Why wouldn’t they also install a way to search comments if it were available. Attendi would be better off trying to build such a service to gain traction for its technology. It could offer a way to power comments for blogs that would make those comments searchable both on that blog alone and across all Attendi-powered blogs. That way, those people who leave their opinions across the blogosphere in the form of comments would surface in Attendi search results. Tapping into blog comments would be a great way to seed its knowledge network.

We’re not sure when it launched, but Fred Wilson has discovered that Seth Godin’s Squidoo has quietly entered the people search field with a new product called Squidwho.

Squidwho provides similar features to competitors including Wink, Spock, PeekYou, WikiYou and Zoominfo. Pages include a short biography, Amazon products (where applicable), YouTube videos, Flickr shots, latest news and RSS feed data from appropriate sites.

Each page is maintained my Squidoo Lens Guide and offers the same revenue share model as regular Squidoo pages offer.

It would be easy to question yet another company targeting people search in what continues to be a hot vertical (even Facebook is now offering public people search), and yet by labelling Squidoo Lens’ under the Squidwho label it’s a logical step for Squidoo. The backend is already in place as are the would-be guides to create the information; in effect the new service is more branding exercise than something completely new.

Facebook just announced that they are now allowing public searches of their users by people without Facebook accounts.

Not much information is included in the results (see image below)- just the name and primary photograph included in the user profile, and users can easily elect to stop search engines from indexing their information by changing their privacy settings.

As Om Malik notes, this is yet another competitive threat in the burgeoning people search scene. We’ve recently covered five new people search engines - Spock, Wink, Zoominfo, WikiYou and PeekYou. All of these services count on the fact that people information is distributed across many different websites and services.

To the extent any one service such as Facebook (or LinkedIn, etc.) gather lots of centralized information about a large group of people and then make it available for general search, these people search engines become much less important. If these startups were public entities, their market valuations would dip today.

PeekYou is a fairly new site that competes in a growingly crowded people search space.

The site offers the standard features we’ve come to expect from people focused search sites. A general user profile includes tags, which are divided into three categories (life, work and school) for context, web links including social network profiles, bio and picture.

PeekYou was founded by Michael Hussey, the creator of sites including RateMyTeachers.com which were later acquired to MTV. Hussey sees PeekYou as being “the ultimate reindexing of the web and a virtual people pages, spanning the entire web and assigning unique identities to individuals made up of everything from Social Networking pages, blog posts, news stories and known online aliases.” OK, so that is a handful, but he is at least aiming high. The site launched in July 2007.

PeekYou competes directly with Spock and in some respect with Wink as well (see our Spock coverage here, others here), so a direct comparison is called for. I like PeekYou in some ways more than Spock. It could be the aesthetics: PeekYou is much nicer to look at and seems to play more nicely as well in terms of editing, where as Spock may provide better links due to its higher user numbers, but it just doesn’t look nearly as nice. The data in PeekYou, at least for the couple of people I checked, also seems to be more accessible (for now). For example, comparing Michael Arrington on PeekYou and Spock (here and here) you get an immediate idea on what Michael is about in PeekYou, where as in Spock there may be more tags and relationships, but they are partially buried and not always immediately clear in terms of context. All up, Spock may be getting all the attention, but PeekYou does offer a decent alternative.