Comp II - People and Company Research: People Search Engines

Google is great- but for researching people, there are specialized search engines that make people searching just a bit easier. They “mash up” information from specific sources like social and professional networking sites, public records, blogs, and the internet and assemble it into a "profile." 

Try these people search engines to help find contact information for an individual. 

• Pipl: searches the “deep Web” by name, email address, online username, or phone number. Results mix online profiles, websites, and news articles. 
• InfoSpace: Contains listings for people, businesses, and events.
• Spock: Searches for information on people from bio pages, social networks, news sites, blogs, directories, and more.
• Wink: Searches people on social networks and on the Web.
• ZoomInfo: Extracts information on individuals from websites, press releases, news services, and SEC filings and summarizes the information.

Unfortunately, machines and computer algorithms cannot judge whether that 67 year old John Smith in Texas is one and the same as the 16 year old John Smith from Santa Cruz California so all of those John Smiths are mixed up in one “profile”. Sorting it out is your job as a human. Still, these search engines can surface information buried within those 2 million plus hits your Google search returns.

• Search yourself or someone you know really well to get a sense of the types of mistakes the search algorithm makes.
• Each site will return different results, so search both.