At first glance, I thought it is another Google. After all, if we need some background information on someone, all we need to do it to google their name. And quite often, it works well enough if that person has an online presence.

So what's so different about pipl? Let me paste here what pipl says about itself:

There are various reasons why you might need to search for people, you may need to find a lost relative, an old flame, a classmate or a business contact, but if you are using a search engine such as Google or Yahoo to search for people you have probably realized by now that it might work in some cases but in most cases it won't.

How come the best search engines fail so miserably when it comes to people search? The answer lies in a little known but very important part of the web called "the deep web".

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.

Since most personal profiles, public records and other people-related documents are stored in databases and not on static web pages, most of the higher-quality information about people is simply "invisible" to a regular search engine.

WOW... it sure sounds scary, doesn't it?

I went to do an experiment with my name and I must confess that I am *so glad* that it didn't work. True enough, there were several people who seem to have the same name as me (darn, I thought I am unique) but none of the dug up identities was me. PHEW!

Perhaps it's because I am in Singapore. Such offerings normally cater well to only places like the United States.

But no harm trying if you need to check up on someone. After all, even if it doesn't work for me, it doesn't mean it won't work for you. It is always better to have more tools at your disposal than one. *wink*

Oh yea, here's the link - http://www.pipl.com . :P