Original Post by slewfootsnoop: Tips, tricks and sources for journalists doing online research

I had a look at Pipl for the first time the other day – and happy news! It’s now my favourite people finder – its like yoname on steroids. Where yoname only lets you search for people across social networks (and a select grouping of them at that), Pipl searches across most of the means by which someone might be (legally) tracked online.

It’s a very simple interface – theres a box for first name, and a box for surname. Its best to ignore the city and state options as these are aimed at American users – instead just put GB in the Country box (if you’re looking for British people). Then click search and prepare to be amazed.

The site uses deep web content from many sites, which web crawlers can’t usually dig out. Your results are clustered, which can be pretty handy depending on the person you’re searching for.

There are public directories results (192.com results, which you will need an account to access electoral roll info, though not directory enquiries), then there are profiles from various social networks (including Last.fm accounts).

You’ll also get ‘quick facts’ (these are results taken from forums and discussion boards featuring the person’s name). There are other profiles and directories results, as well as Public Records (US, sadly), web pages featuring the name (which are presumably registered in the UK), and lastly News articles featuring the name.

It’s pretty comprehensive.

The only thing yoname does better, is that it lets you search an email address as well as a name, which could be handy if that’s the angle you’re snooping from.

In the mean time - use wisely…

One parting whine though - I’m not able to find myself from this blog or my website - which is a bit of a worry, as these are the only two places I’ve made a conscious attempt to get my name out into hyperspace! Anyways, hopefully this is a minor blip (probably on my part)…

Charles Knight at Alt Search Engines provides a more thorough explanation of deep search here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 5:17 pm and is filed under Guest Authors, Reviews, Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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