TechCrunch.com just posted an article about Pipl which is a new ‘people search’ which I just tried out. Very Google-esque in its presentation, but the results are pretty creepy.
It crawls the ‘deep web‘ which are pages that aren’t publically linked to, as well as MySpace, Facebook, Flickr. Doesn’t stop there. I will also dig out news articles, blogs, mugshots, and public record documents on anyone you type in. Granted, this is all public information, but I’ve never seen it all aggrigated into one place.
Just putting in my own information creeped me out. For better or worse, I have a pretty common name so I wouldn’t be too high on the list unless someone knows where you live.
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… Should I want to rank high in those searches to promote my blog or business, and more importantly, how does one engineer that?
