A people’s search engine? Yup, that’s what Pipl claims to be. Pipl is a people search engine that pokes around the Big Data hidden in the Web to give you results that no ordinary Web search engine is perhaps capable of.
It’s been around since 2006 & the reason why Pipl has been featured on this Website is because of its “uniqueness”, something that not many search engines after have been able to capture.
Actually, there 2 parts to the technology used by Pipl that makes it stand out from the crowd of search engines, each of them hoping to become the ‘Google’ of social media, travel or some such. For starters, people search is a completely different kind of cat compared to traditional Web, location or any other sector-specific search. The problem is that information about a specific person you’re looking for is more likely to be in databases than on Web pages.
Ordinary search engines cannot reach these Online databases (property records, SEC data, social network profile pages, etc) because search spiders can only fetch content from pages that are directly linked to others on the Web. They can’t reach profiles & information isolated within Big Data repositories that may not be connected to any other page on the web.
Such Big Data repositories, inaccessible to search engines, together make up what is known as the “deep Web,” which is estimated to be several times larger than your surface Web.
Pipl is able to access these databases & include detailed information from them in the results in response to people search queries. It’s not just people search, either, because you can do reverse phone lookups too, or search by address.
The 2nd part of people search that confounds ordinary search engines is identity resolution. The ability to zero in on the exact John or Jane Smith out of a gazillion search results is very difficult unless you can provide more filters to narrow down the results.
Pipl has an identity resolution system that clusters all the results it finds about a single person into a profile, & shows you the profiles instead of the individual results. This means you have a much easier time deciding which of the profiles matches the person you are looking for.
Just type in your own name in the Pipl search box & see what comes up. You’ll understand how easy it makes things as compared to searching for people on Web search engines.
Pipl’s business model is similar to other people finding tools. It will show you the basic information, & also hit you with ads encouraging you to sign up with a professional background checking service or portal that can provide comprehensive information.
The San Francisco, USA-based Pipl was founded in 2005 & the people search engine was launched in 2006. The company’s CEO is Matthew Hertz.
Image Credit: Pipl
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