Search Engine Watch’s Eric Enge noted that search engine giant Google thinks so; it hosted a People Search SIG earlier this month.  And a factoid on the Search SIG page also supports the idea: “30% of all searches on Google or Yahoo! are for specific people or people related,” the group states.

But the spotlight turned to Wink, Spock, and ZoomInfo on the night of the session, as Michael Tanne, Jaideep Singh, and Bryan Burdick (the CEOs of those respective companies) took the stage.

Furthermore, “[Y]ou can see that many companies are doing quite well with their people search strategies,” writes Enge.  “Most people are also familiar with Classmates and its leading competitor Reunion,” he continues, and we mustn’t forget Pipl, which won a strong standing in the 2007 SEOmoz Web 2.0 Awards.

People search is growing segment of the search market; don’t expect the rate of its expansion to slow down anytime soon.

Just last week, Pipl was awarded third place in the “search” category of SEOmoz’s Web 2.0 Awards.  Rand Fishkin, Pete Cashmore, Danny Sullivan, and Vanessa Fox were among the contest’s judges and contributors, and they granted the fledgling search engine five stars for usability and another five for usefulness.

Pipl has also been mentioned on Search Engine Land.  “It searches across a wide variety of resources, and it does it reasonably quickly,” writes Phil Bradley.

All’s not well, though – Bradley later continued, “[B]ut there were a few gaps that surprised me.  No mention of social bookmarking services for example – I would expect to be able to see if people with the name I was looking for had marked things in del.icio.us or Furl for example.”

Pipl’s results page is also a problem.  The whole thing is just a little “blah” (yes, that’s the technical term for it).  Aside from being dull, the results lack organization; the two issues actually seem related, as a system of tabbed headings (or anything other than the current list-like presentation) could solve both problems at once.

Still, Pipl does its job and yields some good results.  In comparison to Google, well . . . some of the news and Web results bear the “powered by Google” logo, so the two aren’t exactly at each other’s throats.

In the “Business” section, a site called Squidoo took top honors.  If you’ve never heard of Squidoo – and, to be honest, more than a few of the winners had gone unnoticed by me – it will allow you to make a “‘lens’ to market yourself, your products or just something that you’re passionate about.  View and rate other people’s lenses and hope your content is rated well by others!”

As for the “Search” categories, Rollyo came in first, Eurekster Swicki placed second, and Pipl got third, so the omnipresent Google was, surprisingly, not visible among the top three.  Simply Google did receive an honorable mention, however.

In my relatively random recap of the Web 2.0 Awards, the section on social networking comes up next.  Here we see at least one name that should be familiar to most: Facebook.  I know Facebook has claimed more than a few minutes of my life, and it managed to claim first place in these rankings, as well.  Mingle2 followed behind, with Imbee (a site aimed solely at kids) bringing up the rear.

And I believe that’ll just about do it for this summary of the SEOmoz monster list.  Here, however, are a few more sites that caught my eye:

Biblio (number two in “Books”)
Pandora (number one in “Music”)
LinkedIn (number one in “Professional Networking”)
Zillow (number one in “Real Estate”)
FeedBurner (number one in “Feed Management”)

Credit for assembling the original beast goes to Jane Copland, and my hat is also off to a number of judges and contributors who also played important roles.