
Pipl.com: people search so good it will scare your pants off - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/29/piplcom-people-search-engine-so-good-it-will-scare-your-pants-off/
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mattchew
I searched for a couple of old co-workers and got a torrent of garbage
results. Also, slooooooow.

There is good, and then there is not good. This is not good.

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shizcakes
Worked for me, and really, the results are not that great. In fact, the only
result that was somewhat interesting was what popped up in the
peoplefinder.com sponsored link - the rest of the results were wildly
inaccurate. And, seeing as they are just a Google custom search anyways, I
would say that they are "no better than Google", despite what the TechCrunch
article says.

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dominik
"What makes Pipl different?" leads me to: _Unlike a typical search-engine,
Pipl is designed to retrieve information from the deep web, our robots are set
to interact with searchable databases and extract facts, contact details and
other relevant information from personal profiles, member directories,
scientific publications, court records and numerous other deep-web sources._

But much of the "deep web" isn't indexed because indexing either involves
ignoring robots.txt or explicitly going against a site's Terms of Use. For
example, take Amazon, which Pipl holds up as an example of a site that has
"deep web" content. Amazon's Terms of Use, available here
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=5...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=508088)
say: license does not include ... any use of data mining, robots, or similar
data gathering and extraction tools.

How does Pipl index the deep web then? Have they gotten permission from all
these companies? The TechCrunch article notes "[t]he folks at Pipl were
hesitant to discuss their “secret sauce” with me" and only provides vague
details, but even those details seem to point towards some sort of automated
crawling of parts of sites that those sites' Terms of Use usually forbid
automated crawling of.

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icey
I tried it... I'm still wearing pants.

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justindz
I took off my pants and then tried it, but I don't think that proves anything.
About the site.

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gecko
Also so good that it's currently down due to high traffic.

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vaksel
still works for me, well everything except email and username parts

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sarvesh
Down for me too."Sorry, we're very popular..."

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TooMuchNick
Sounds like that line in Bridget Jones: "I'm very busy and important."

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jodrellblank
Found an old ICQ account I forgot I had with an embarassing nickname.

ICQ wan't tell me the password unless I can remember and still access the
email account I had 10-14 years ago. ICQ has, apparently no way to contact
them and no other way to delete an account. Great. Thanks, ICQ.

~~~
jodrellblank
More that I couldn't write on an iPhone keyboard:

What I'd like ICQ to do is something like: Recognise that the account has been
unused for a decade and that it doesn't matter if I _am_ an imposter and agree
to clear the profile at least.

Or, provide some hints to the email address and see if I can complete it.

Or, ask for some sort of proof of ID, given that the name is real and fairly
unique.

Get rid of their dismissive don't-care "there is no way to delete an account,
just edit your profile to clear the details and forget it exists. If you can't
get back into your account with the email-me-a-password feature then that's
it, you will need to register a new account" policy.

Or, at least, have some way of talking to them and someone who gives a toss.
The forum has lots of completely ignored "please delete my account" posts -
I've even seen three with passwords, at least one of which works(!). I was
going to be nice and login and reset the password - but the only way to reset
your password is from the ICQ client(!). Sod that.

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0xdefec8
The PDF results are sort of cool, but it seems like just another meta-search
engine to me.

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okeumeni
This stuff is SCARY!!

I have been playing around searching for people I know, I came to know that a
friend of mine and a close neighbor have court records. One had his house
foreclosed before and one had a misdemeanor, I don’t know what to think.

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huhtenberg
It aggregates the data from various sources and makes an attempt to present it
neatly, but results-wise it's nothing special. People who wanted to be found
(e.g. with blogs, Facebook, Linked In accounts, etc) were found, while all
others were not or they were buried in a lot of noise. As such it is
marginally more convenient than regular googling and nothing to lose the pants
over.

If it were able to understand that _this_ guy here is the same guy as _that_
guy over there going by the account nickname, and then link both to an actual
person, then - yeah - that'd be interesting, very interesting.

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gpmedia
Never really was fond of the idea of a people search engine. Albeit facebook
has become one, but at least that's a search engine where you are actively
taking part of supplying them with data.

As a science experiment fine (indexing etc), but commercially it just freaks
me out.

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TooMuchNick
Meh. Nothing I don't see on my Google search. And they didn't find my email
address.

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dfranke
Nope. Fail. The only hit it found which was actually me was my home page, and
that way down in the list. Not terribly impressive since it's the first hit if
you Google my name.

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biohacker42
This is unsettling, the creepy future is here to stay I'm afraid.

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jedc
A truly scary proposition is entering a username and coming up with
names/addresses/etc.

That would scare the crap out of quite a few people, I would guess.

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brandnewlow
No interesting info on my hard-to-find-online ex-girlfriend. Fail.

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matthias
well it found my friendster! those were the days

