I came to know about this piece of news from TechCrunch yesterday about launch of new people search engine called Pipl. Though Google can be good at search of usual stuff you want to find over the web but Pipl helps you find something deep enough to scare you. As Gaurav found out too – He says

I searched for Gaurav Mishra and here’s what I found: quick facts, personal profiles, contact details, email addresses, photos, blogs, websites, news stories, and even mentions in PDF documents.

Now that is really scary. One of the reasons being we never want to reveal more than what is needed over the web since the idea of someone stalking always haunts. But as we spend more & more time over internet, we do give some details which we may regret later. Though I take much care about the same but it can turn out to be an personal issue for sure. BTW My Pipl search is here. On the same note, I did found my mobile number same as someone else’s from Indonesia. Posted a tweet too that if it’s possible?

Now to some number game:

According to ComScore’s December numbers, Pipl is leading in the US with 557K unique users to Spock’s (another people finder search engine) 260K, but is trailing internationally with 1.35M uniques to Spock’s 2.38M.

One of the interesting things about Pipl is the concept of its bot crawling deep web. According to Roi Carthy

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.

Finally thinking about some bot crawling in my email messages and indexing it for some ill intentioned entity is scary since Pipl also just debuted the ability to search emails, usernames and by reverse phone number lookup.

But till something like that happens and we land up in trouble, we can enjoy Pipl’ling few names