An interesting search engine for people, not words or phrases, is 123People.com. Here’s the description from the site:
About 123people
123people is a real time people search tool
that looks into nearly every corner of the Web. Using our proprietary
search algorithm, you can find comprehensive and centralized people
related information consisting of images, videos, phone numbers, email
addresses, social networking and Wikipedia profiles and much more. All
of this rich media profile content is pulled from an extensive list of
international as well a regional relevant sources. 123people is also a
social activity that applies crowd wisdom. Users can add information to
every single search result, giving it more relevance with details that
are yet not found in the Internet. This takes the quality of people
search to the next level.
It’s very similar to yasni.com (has launched at same time in the US). So I think that search algorithm is not really proprietary, is it?
But approaches are different: at 123people you can rate every link (does it influence results by the way?), with yasni it’s possible to differentiate yourself from other people with same name by personal profiles.