Pipl.com: people search so good it will scare your pants off | Hacker News Reader

Pipl.com: people search so good it will scare your pants off

techcrunch.com

17 pointsvaksel22 comments

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.

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.

"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... 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which means I probably won't remember to try it again :/ Bit of a waste of time...

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

well it found my friendster! those were the days

Reply on news.ycombinator.com