Find more personal information on people through deep web searches

Posted on August 19, 2007 at 5:50 pm

Make sure to read other posts from the People Search series!

ZabaSearch - Search public information for people, phone numbers, ip addresses, and more for free
Search for people using Spock - The people search engine
Find more personal information on people through deep web searches

In two previous posts, listed above in this series, you can use Spock and ZabaSearch to find out a person’s previous and current address, birthday, phone number, etc. Spock tries to be slightly different by providing search results pulled from other locations on the net, such as public profiles or pages on a college web site. In this way, you can search for a person and their LinkedIn profile might show up along with a web page from the college they attended as part of some club.

Pipl is another site that allows you to search for more personal information about people through what is called the “deep web“. The deep web is a term used to refer to all of the content on the Internet that is not searchable by the normal search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, etc. The reason for this is because a lot of the data on the Internet is not stored on a web page, but instead inside of a database. Databases are not indexed by search engines, therefore they miss out on tons and tons of valuable data. According to experts, the 8 billion web pages indexed by Google constitute only 1/500 of the data stored in the deep web.

Deep web data consist of online databases such as Amazon, Hoovers, Friendster, MySpace, flickr, InfoSpace, etc. If you’re able to find information from these data sources, you can imagine the amount of information one can find about you! In the coming years, any profile you create online will more than likely be found by these deep searches.

The search performed by Pipl is in real-time using automated robots that connect to databases such as member directories, scientific publications, court records, government records, etc.

To get started, type in the first name, last name, and city and state if you know of the person you are searching for. The information you can find about a person is scary! I searched my name and found stuff that I didn’t even know I had done!

Firstly, it listed both of my addresses in the last five years with phone numbers, along with the month and year of my birthday!

Then, it looked for online profiles and found my Amazon.com profile and my Friendster profile.

After that it found that I was once licensed to sell insurance in Louisiana while working for a financial institution in college!

Then it listed a review that I had written on Yelp.com, the site where you can find reviews and guides of local restaurants, businesses etc.

And finally, it found information about me in the Yahoo member directory and some other web directories! Pretty amazing! Of course, I don’t have a very common name, so I could find info about myself without even a city or state! However, searching on more common names will give you a crap load of results, so it’s good to know a few basic pieces of information first.

And as a good practice, be careful what you list on the Internet! If you find something you don’t want online, try to contact that particular web site or agency and see if it can be removed.