Pipl: Cool ‘People’ Search Engine and Viral Marketing Success Story
By Anna Johnson on February 10th, 2009Want to get the juice on someone? Well, you can always use one of the major search engines. But, being a ‘people’ search engine, Pipl.com promises to deliver much better results. And it’s pretty good too. Perhaps too good.
Using Pipl is as simple as entering in someone’s name and location (if known). Pipl will then generate results based on profiles found on social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, blog mentions, and photos on Flickr.
But it doesn’t top there. Pipl then finds mentions of the person’s name in public records – property records, SEC filings and birth databases – as well as email addresses.
Part of Pipl’s ingenuity is that it crawls the ‘deep web.’ This means it doesn’t just search pages that other pages link to (as a typical search engine does) but it also searches pages that NO other pages link to.
Although Pipl compiles its results on publicly available information… it’s arguable that the tool makes it just a little bit too easy to find out about someone.
Meanwhile, Pipl claims to be a genuine viral success story. Pipl CEO, Matthew Hertz, attributes its growth – achieving some 557,000 visitors in December (based on comScore data) – to word of mouth. Not bad!
In terms of its business model, Pipl generates revenue through text-based sponsored links and results.
Source: Roi Carthy, “Pipl.com: People Search Engine So Good, It Will Scare Your Pants Off,” January 29, 2009
February 10th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
http://www.123people.com is a fast growing people search site you should also check out.