Find People on Google-Plus by Emails

Finding social profiles by email addresses have some good applications in Sourcing. Examples are cross-referencing profiles and looking up extra professional information, as well as making several guesses about an unknown email address and finding out which guess is correct. Rapportive does those look-ups; it is one of my favorite tools.

Here are some cool features that Google-Plus offers us in this regard, additional to those already described in an earlier post about Rapportive and Google-Plus.

The techniques I am going to describe work with email lists.

If you have a list of email addresses and paste the list into a new email in your Gmail account, you can locate those who have Google-Plus profiles by moving the mouse over their addresses.  From here you can add the person to circles or click on the link and go to the profile:

This information is an instant look-up in the Google-Plus membership database, so it’s up-to-date, guaranteed.

If you have Rapportive installed, you will see the information it keeps in its database of profiles as well – on the right, as usual, on mousing over an address. (In some cases Rapportive may miss the Google-plus profile, so the information may be complementary.)

This is useful! However, you will not know anything about a specific email address from your list (whether it points to a profile or not) until you move the mouse over it.

There’s a quick way to find out which email addresses in a list do point to  Google-Plus profiles without doing these individual look-ups. (Using the mouse may still be necessary, but only to scroll the list.) If you are cross-referencing a list of guesses to find the correct email address for one specific person, you will instantly see the answer, similarly to using LinkedIn for that, but faster if the profile exists on Google-Plus.

Here is how. Start “sharing” something with your list of email addresses, by pasting the list into the “share with” box on Google-Plus. (I don’t mean that you should actually share anything, just start using the sharing dialog.) The emails that point to profiles will show little icons from the profiles, or generic person icons for those who didn’t upload a profile picture. The ones with an envelope icon shown are those that do not point to profiles:

From here, too, you can add people to Google-Plus circles or view their profiles.

Lastly, for an even better viewing experience of the cross-referenced email addresses you can also try to select the “browse people” icon…

… and paste the list to see the profiles, as the screenshot below illustrates. However, at least in my experience, this gets too slow for lists with over a couple dozen or so email addresses; scrolling stops working. Still, for shorter lists this can be quite satisfactory.

P.S. Check out this post as well on http://pibuzz.com – Find People On Social Networks By Email; it has some more interesting tips on the subject.