Information Gathering II : Pipl.com

Well after writing about Informationg Gathering and Spokeo, now it's the turn of Pipl.com as you can tell from the name is oriented to search information about individuals.

The application doesn't need a registration, this is good, and the search parameters that you can use is the Name, Last Name, City and Country, but also they  recently added the reverse lookup, where you can use an email address, nickname or phone number!

As usual i started searching for myself, and Pipl shielded more results than Spokeo. In the results we can find online profiles (Facebook, Myspace, etc), photo albums, Youtube accounts, Amazon accounts, blog posts, documents, pictures (with thumbnails) and many other kind of results.

Really is an interesting tool, and is improving over the time.

About the differences between Spokeo and Pipl, is that Spokeo aim to be more of a tracking tool of what is your "friends" doing, than  a one shot search and investigation. Also Spokeo just allow you to do 1 free check, and if you want more you must pay.

Finally one thing that i would like to see in these tools is an API to automate the search, and stop worrying about the changes in the results and the performance of my parsers.

Stay tuned because there are two new contenders in the arena of people search that i am testing this week.

 

Enjoy your investigations ;)

-CMM

Information Gathering I : Spokeo

Hi all,  i was researching new information gathering sources when i stumble with a website called Spokeo, in their website they claim that it "searches deep within 41 major social networks to find truly mouth-watering news about friends and coworkers", well it seems it's oriented to the gossip world, what everybody loves ;)

After seeing this promising prospect i decide to take a look and try this application, the main option is that you log in with your email account, and Spokeo will retrieve all your contacts and start gathering info about them, that's is not gonna happen in the this test; i prefer to search for a contact using an email address or a blog url.

So i launched a search with myself hoping for a good set of results.... but it was a great disappointing, Spokeo returned a very poor result set, well i though that maybe with other users i will have more results... but no, nothing at all, less info than before.

Maybe  if you allow the use of the API login, with your credentials will shield more results, but i didn't try this option yet.

A curious fact is that Spokeo has created a marketing campaign addressed at Human Resources people with "Spokeo HR", allowing the recruiters to perform an online profile of the candidate.

So it turned to be a good promise with disappointing results.

Do you have any feedback from this application?

Which other application do you recommend?

-CMM