Highena

After months of private testing in beta, today 123people.com launched in the US, and has already sent it’s first visitor over to Highena. 123people is a people search engine. If there’s somebody – rather than just something – that you’re looking for, rather than go to Myspace, Facebook, Friendster, Friendsreunited etc, 123people does the search for you.

Just enter the name and the postcode of the person you’re looking for and it returns the results of the matching emails, phone numbers, blogs, videos, pictures and more.

The search engine was launched by i5invest a European-based IT and telecom incubator. Before being available in the US it was first introduced in Austria, Switzerland and Germany.

I think it’s a fantastic idea for a search engine, and the people behind the idea are not at all boastful about their plans for the future:

123people is not setting out to compete with major search engines, but redefining the search for people.

The new feature uses the wisdom of crowds to add more relevance to search results. Users can now add and tag information to all search results.

Although it won’t compete with the major search engines, I still expect 123people to be immensely popular.