Google may be good at many things, but people search is not one of them. For that you’ll have to use a more specialized search engine. Spock and Wink (merged with Reunion.com) are the people-search destinations most TechCrunch readers could probably name off the top of their head. However, slowly but surely—and mostly, very quietly—a new player has been making serious headway in this search vertical, and it’s name is Pipl.com.
Going by ComScore’s December numbers, Pipl is leading in the US with 557K unique users to Spock’s 260K, but is trailing internationally with 1.35M uniques to Spock’s 2.38M. How has Pipl pulled this off? Matthew Hertz, the company CEO, tells me it’s mostly word-of-mouth. It’s a simple answer but it rings true. Just take it out for a spin and you’ll see why—it’s just good. In fact it’s so good it’ll probably scare some people’s pants off when they see what information it is able to—legally—drudge up.
It produces not only links to all of your profiles on social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, blog mentions, and photos on Flickr. It finds mentions of your name in public records, including property records, SEC filings, and birth databases. It also finds e-mail addresses and summarizes “quick facts” about the person. For instance, a search for “Roi Carthy” turns up quick facts like these:
Roi Carthy is an Israeli-based entrepreneur and startup consultant…
Editor’s note: Roi Carthy is currently writing for TechCrunch…
Unlike most search engines, Pipl crawls the Deep Web. I’ll explain. A general purpose search engine typically crawls the Web by following links to URLs found in other pages. By contrast, the Deep Web is made up of pages that no other pages link to. Dynamic pages are a good example of these sorts of pages. This means that if an engine wants to index pages located in Deep Web repositories it has to “guess” possible URLs. Just how big is the Deep Web? No one really knows but it’s generally accepted that it is vastly greater (orders of magnitude greater) than the Surface Web—the pages which are easily indexed by search engines.
The folks at Pipl were hesitant to discuss their “secret sauce” with me, so their explanations were on the vague side but here it is in broad strokes: First, Pipl’s crawlers hunt out Deep Web sources and URLs. Special algorithms they developed then perform the “guesswork” of possible inputs. The ensuing pages are then parsed for various types of data and images (Pipl even augments with meta data that appears elsewhere). Finally, using advanced language analysis and ranking, Pipl floats the most relevant portions of information about an individual. Remember, all of this is very tricky because in the Deep Web there is no real way to rate a web page based on its importance, for the simple fact that no other page is linking to it.
Obviously, Pipl is designed for people search by name, but it also just debuted the ability to search emails, usernames and by reverse phone number lookup. The results page is designed as a “one page report” that categorizes information in an easy to read manner. Results are displayed based on accuracy, relevance and importance, particularly useful for results for common names (”John Smith”).
Pipl’s business model is pretty straight forward: Sponsored links and results, all in the form of text ads, displayed on the results pages—there are no banners, keeping the look and feel clean. Most if not all ads are linked to background-report providers, which are far more relevant to US users than the international ones, but hey, revenue is revenue.
So next time you want to search for your former high school sweetheart or a long lost relative, try Pipl, it seems like the best place to start.
Oh wow it even brought up weird pdf documents that were relevant on some of the searches I did.
Say bye bye to any online privacy that was left. Its like hiring a PI for free.
What a load of rubbish. If you put personal information about yourself in the public domain, it is you who has thrown away your privacy. The only thing that comes up when I search for myself on this service or on Google is my blog, because I deliberately don’t plaster myself all over the web.
If you want privacy, don’t put your personal information in the public domain, it’s not an amazingly difficult concept.
NOT TRUE!
This had info that had been submitted to my insurance company, and it had address taken from court records, none of this is info i would ever give online, I would never give my DOB online an boom there it is.
So buddy your wrong.
that is a crock. I am EXTREMELY protective of my information as I have children. I always use a FAKE address and phone number. So how did I then end up on PIPL with not only correct information listed. But extremely detailed information. I almost died. Now I just need to figure out which software is best for protective purposes.
oh and yes, btw the name and email are FAKE
This article is a VAST OVERSTATEMENT.
There are so many free people search sites like this :
1. http://www.birthdatabase.com
2. http://worldcon...eb.ancestry.com
3. http://aafter.com
4. http://www.zabasearch.com
and all of them point to paid services that compete with them. The more you offer free the less you may make. How does it work?
pipl.com is pretty scary when you think about its use for identity theft but it also brought up a few accounts that I forgot I had!
Spokeo.com is a bit more creepy in my book though.
look at spock unusual rise in traffic. these scores appear to be vulnerable to gaming.
check out this interesting search engine my partner sent me.
http://www.airt...ag_browser/app/
companies mentioned help you find people but they did not choose a good domain name to find them.
those domains will handicap those companies forever. funny thing when you business name is your own worst enemy.
GoodLocator.com – get it
Spam much?
So, hows does the domain humanlocator.com help you find people? fill us in
@JD right now humanlocator.com is a tag. a strategic common sense natural language location based channel. google the channel and you’ll get this comment. i have just helped people find peepl, wink, spoke and missinglocator. thanks for asking.
@rian TC does not allow spam.
Your website is terrible and you spam stupid comments on every techcrunch article. You’re an idiot.
Wow. It’s true. That service is creepily accurate…
Accurate?
PIPL can’t find me. No where in the mess of results is anything related to me.
I do a lot of people searching, and I am personally rather easy to find. Google, I am usually in the top three results.
How come Lexis and Westlaw never come up in these discussion?
Has been around for quite a long time..Surprised TC is discovering it now!
It’s dead, Jim.
Looks like it got crunched. Have to check back in a bit.
Oh, wow! You ain’t kidding! I “pipled” myself and found blog posts, comments, profiles all over the web, even a MySpace account I swore I cancelled more than a year ago! Pipl is kind of like a modern identity check — maybe as important as a credit check.
That’s a wonderful site.I liked pipl.com and i found my friend address too
I just looked up myself, got my linked in profile on spock, but pipl seems to be down (bad gateway)
Should have called it Stalkr.com!
“504 Gateway Time-out
The server didn’t respond in time. ”
Nice! Don’t you wish you had load tested your service *before* it showed up on the home page of TechCrunch.
Yup. Slashdotted by Techcrunch.
Well, it definitely worked the first time (and quite well), but I got an error that they received too much traffic the second go around…I guess that’s why Google remains king…they’re prepared for the hits.
they’ll need to get their act together cos they evidently can’t handle a traffic surge like the one this post just generated…it’s down
Just read about it and tried. I always searched at google for people from my old school times and didn’t find anything.
Now first search on pipl.com and I found some of them. Great site!
Seriously nice. But, oh dear, they never expected this. They’re DOWN !!
While, now they have officially shutdown while they upgrade. Not be best first impression.
apparently your article had some impact – it’s down!
they only have a little over 3 million pages indexed in google. so unless there are pages not indexed, it probably doesn’t have the person you are looking for on there.
This was coming. It has been for a long time. Everything is online now it seems and what isn’t online yet will be soon. Even if you try to avoid the Web it’s gonna get ya
it didn’t do a great job with me as it seemed to weight bebo more first and I am not on bebo, google brings me up the top result
Here’s what happened when I tried:
Search Error
We’re sorry, due to a technical problem we could not return the results of your query.
Our support staff was automatically notified of this error and will try to resolve the issue as soon as possible.
“So good, it will scare your pants off.” I’ve still got my boots on and I’m shaking in them.
Wiik. Yer sirvir sucs. Git fawnded sewn.
They did it with SEO, not word of mouth and they are still far behind Namyz.
the site’s down due to the high volume of traffic they’re getting (from this blog i imagine – haha)
We’re sorry for the inadequate first impression but we can currently serve only about 70% of the users that come to our site at this point so the other 30% are getting a temporary error page.
We are upgrading our capacity and will soon allow everyone in.
There are so many of these now, that I dunno if they are that valuable anymore. Most of them have higher PR pages than Pipl.
BTW, for those of you interested,
http://picasawe...754674910735890
This is my new pie. Crosses fingers.
123people is also a vertical people search, that is blowing up on the web.
Its also available in the UK, Germany, France and Spain as well as the US. So it offers localized searches.
http://www.123people.com
I second John Duke, it’s like pipl got slashdotted as soon as you wrote about them. The site is down now. LOL.
engineering FAIL- uh yeah if more than 5 people use the site…..down
My pants are still on.
Now that I got it to work, I’m not particularly impressed. I didn’t get better results than googling myself, and I got a lot more outdated stuff at the top. The only thing they’ve done better is the layout, so it looks like more information on the first page.
The huge, huge disadvantage, and what would have me stick with Google is that Pipl is a competitor to LinkedIn, and most of the relevant information for me is on the LinkedIn profile. As far as I’m concerned, if you skip people’s LinkedIn profile, as an information aggregation point, forget it. (The second disadvantage is that Pipl Googles poorly, while LinkedIn Googles well.)
I spoke to the folks at Pipl and they’re experiencing 14x their normal traffic. They’re on it and normal search should resume soon.
Great piece Roi. I cited your article in my column (above)
I came accross pipl earlier this month googling some one else – it’s amazing the amount of data it came back with.
What’s Pipl’s business model? Great you got a good people search engine, but how do they make money?
Explained in the second to last paragraph
Pipl.com is OLD – why post on it now as if it’s fresh news?
I would argue that this post is the first to dive into how they do what they do.
I think you’re right, Roi.
Pipl has been quite popular with recruiters for a good year or two, but if you search recruiting blogs you’ll see that there’s been plenty written on the utility of the service but essentially nothing on the business model (and what do the users care?).
I searched Pipl and got this. I guess they underestimated the impact of Techcrunch’s traffic.
“Sorry, we’re very popular…
Due to an unusually large amount of traffic we had to disable the search access for a short while.
Please be patient while we upgrade our capacity or bookmark our site and visit us later.
Thank you for visiting Pipl. ”
They are now remining me of Cuil.
Beware of searching on sites like Pipl; many sites with weak privacy policies like theirs will create pages of “recent searches” for the simple purpose of getting them indexed in Google. Then when you search Google, not only does your Pipl profile come up in searches, but also lists of “recent searches” that show who people who searched for you also searched for (because the recent searches are often in order by date). I see nothing in Pipl’s terms or privacy policy that says they won’t do this.
Damn! Your story broke Pipl! I use it all the time. It’s like you left the garage door open and all the neighbors are wandering in. Thanks (but certainly glad Pipl’s getting the recognition it’s finally due!)
-chris
Not impressed. It “worked” for me. But then I have a very rare name – only 400-500 people have my last name worldwide, and I don’t know of anyone else with both my first and last name (pipl lists one other person on the UK electoral roll, but from the age I suspect it’s a reference to my household because of my wife)
But when I tried a few friends with more common names, it invariably listed lots of info about people who shared their names, all jumbled up, with no apparent attempts at disambiguating or clustering the information (clustering on e-mail addresses where present for example) , and no way of narrowing/refining the results to try to remove some of the people I was not looking for.
It’s a nice enough mashup, but for the most part it looks like it’s “just” executing a bunch of searches for the name at different sites, and that most of what you save is the time it’d take to run those searches yourself. Which is ok – but often when I am looking for info on someone, my initial searches will reveal enough information that I can do better by more specific searches.
It doesn’t even provide links for obvious expansions or refinements of search such as searching for e-mail addresses it found (it found a few of mine – but by no means all of the addresses I have or have had that are *widely* available in Google)
I don’t think it’s a bad site, but I think this article oversold it massively. It certainly doesn’t scare *my* pants off – there are far embarrassing details about me accessible with just a few Google searches for someone who takes the time to follow the breadcrumbs (or even just browse through enough pages of a name search).
Why does every new search engine goes down when reviewed by TC?
Not impressed, either! ONly good thing they’ve done is avoid crawling crappy sources.
unfortunately it’s down due to traffic (thanks, tech crunch). pipl 1.0 was less than impressive though.
all people search engines raise serious privacy concerns. I just looked at spokeo earlier this week — “Social Media Search: A stalker’s paradise?”
http://blogs.co..._media_stalking
Got a response from Spokeo CEO Harrison Tang here — “How private is your data?”
http://blogs.co.../online_privacy
i’d still take spokeo over spock, though.
bottom line: people search sites are creepy, and the better they are, the creepier. but we mostly have only ourselves to blame for putting this stuff online in the first place.
cheers,
dt
Making the FBI’s day a little easier.
not sure whether I should be glad or dissapointed.
Luckly I dont post under my real name so it brought up a domain name I own and 1 other thing. Could find same on Google.
Tried other friends and again same as Google
Come back to me when its not rubbish
I was wondering if my comment would get posted and evidently it didn’t… I’ll say this again, this post reads like a paid review.
Mark–I did not delete your comment. Not sure why it didn’t show up. And no, this is not a paid review. Sorry to disappoint.
Whoa!
I found stuff about me that even I forgot… comments I made on an article I reviewed 15 years ago… a “virtual room” that I designed in some experimental virtual city 13 years ago… I am still going through all this stuff and reminiscing…
I did happen to Google myself a few times in the last few years (come on, don’t tell me all of you don’t do that
and some of these things in PIPL I never saw on Google.
What’s more, when I tried to locate these pieces of info on Google again now, this time knowing what I am looking for, it wasn’t easy!
Good stuff. Don’t know what the future holds for them, but definitely something new to look at.
I just checked this out and am both impressed and scared. I hope we enjoyed the last of our online privacy…
But in addition to all the creepiness that comes with a search engine like this hitting the masses also makes for some opportunity.
I wonder if there’s going to now be Pipl ‘optimization’ for people who want themselves to be found (thinking freelancers, musicians, blogger, etc). So there can be a lot of good to come out of this in terms of self promoting…
@ryancmiller
ryancmiller.com
Pipl is very well done. No question about it. It looks and behaves like a research tool, which is exactly what you want in a people search engine. It’s a utility and doesn’t pretend to be anything else.
by fa the scariest result come from http://www.123people.com
by fa the scariest results come from http://www.123people.com
like the FacebookConnect, it’s really starting to pop up everywhere!
Ugh, this deep search is freakish. It dug up my email address b/c an email I wrote was posted verbatim by someone on a random Apache developer list.
Now I wish I hadn’t used my SSN as my email signature (kidding)