When you type in someones name, it usually produces paid search results for people search companies if they have a match. how is this done? We have a UK people finder database, and are interested in doing these type of ads for the UK
By "paid results," do you mean sponsored links (i.e. Google ads)? Unless I misunderstand your query, you appear to be referring to ads generated via Google's AdWords, which is based your keywords. Personal names are not substantially different from other keywords and you can bid on them. One problem is that they might be expensive to bid on: if the name does not actually appear on your ad's landing page (or even somewhere else on your site), your quality score for that name is likely to be high, so you end up paying more for the ad to run. But if you have the funds, more power to you!
Sorry, you are mistaken, these are the new "Real-Time" advertisers such as Facebook and Twitter... they query their databases on the fly when it recognises a search as a name. There is no way a people search site like Intellius has bid on every name in its database! For an example, search for "Paul Franken". You get these sponsored ads: We Found Paul Franken Current Phone, Address, Age & More. Instant & Accurate Paul Franken www.Intelius.com Records: Paul Franken The Most Comprehensive Database of Public Records. Get Results Now! www.PublicRecords.com As you can see they have searched their database and confirmed they have entries for that name, on the fly.
Nah, I am not mistaken -- these are simple dynaimic Google AdWords ads. They are actually a good way to improve your Google conversion. You get the Ad title to match search term dynamically by using the {keyword: } syntax. When you write your ad, just put {keyword: } in line 1 instead of a specific search phrase. (There are nuances but this is the basic principle.) You can also use {KeyWord: } with capital K and W is you want every word in the ad title to be capitalized. I disagree and am puzzled as to why you find this so incredible. It's really quite simple. There is no need to look the name up in the DB, they simply replicate the names from the DB as AdWords keywords (you have to ask your Google rep to permit you to have a very large number of keywords, but they do that as a matter of course). Amazon does a similar thing with authors' names. That's the beauty of Pay Per Click -- your keywords are free until someone clicks on your ad.
P.S. To assure you even more emphatically, I have just checked my sources and Intelius.com is using about 5 million keywords in their AdWords campaign -- and those are only the onse that actually trigger ads. They undoubtedly have multiple times more that are passive. For this many keywords, I imagine they probably use the Google API rather than port the keywords manually, so you may be right that the implementation is a bit more sophisticated. You can check out the AdWords API here: http://code.google.com/apis/adwords/ I mentioned that bidding on personal may be expensive because of lower quality scores. On the other hand, not a lot of competitors are bidding on millions of personal names, so it may even out.