Over at Search Engine Land Phil Bradley has presented a new people search engine called Pipl.

He says: “Rather than just go off and hunt for email addresses, this tries to search through the deep/invisible/hidden web to return content that other search engines are going to miss.”

Pipl adds:

“Also known as ‘invisible web’, the term ‘deep web’ refers to a vast repository of underlying content, such as documents in online databases that general-purpose web crawlers cannot reach. The deep web content is estimated at 500 times that of the surface web, yet has remained mostly untapped due to the limitations of traditional search engines.”

Pipl does by no means spider all of the invisible web, but the search results definitely prove that they have managed to map some essential parts of it.

We have done a search for Phil Bradley (of course!).

The search results are divided into several categories.

Given that we have told the search engine that Mr. Bradley is from the UK, it first lists a result from the British electoral roll (192.com). Excellent!

Then the result page goes on to list “Results for Phil Bradley without United Kingdom”. We interpret this to mean “outside the UK”. Given the international nature of this man’s activities, that is not a problem.

There are several relevant hits under the “Quick facts” heading, including:

Phil Bradley is a well known UK based Internet consultant… (indeed he is; from www.lishow.co.uk)
Phil Bradley has yet another blog - this one a less work-related, more personal one… (from lorelibrarian.blogspot.com)
Phil Bradley had 3 good years with the Seattle Mariners from 1985 to 1987, but was considered a bust after he was acquired in a trade by the Philadelphia… (wooops, this another P. Bradley ,cf. www.baseball-reference.com)
Phil Bradley had identified around 140 general search engines and says that over 2000 search engines in 200 countries exist… (definitely on target, from www.abcseo.com)

Then there are results from profiles and directories, publications (including blogs and research papers), public records, web pages (Google) and news articles (Google), and finally links to alternative forms of the same name (Philetus Bradley, Phillip Bradley).

It also fetches information from Amazon and Linkedin. Honestly, I didn’t know I had a public profile page at Amazon.com! I am clearly buying too many books from them….

To the extent Phil Bradely is unhappy about the site, it is the lack of inclusion of the social web: “No mention of social bookmarking services for example - I would expect to be able to see if people with the name I was looking for had marked things in del.icio.us or Furl for example.”

That may be a good idea. All in all, however, this a very impressive and bookmark-worthy search engine.

And note, it has another important use beyond finding friends and lost relatives. You can also use it to identify the amount of public information available about you and your family. I would guess that that will be a pretty scary experience for some people.

Pandia has an extensive list of search tools for finding people and email addresses.