The Creepiest People-Finding Search Engines

Chances are you've Googled yourself and were surprised by the results. But have you ever pipled yourself? Or spocked yourself? You might be downright creeped out. The new people search engines delve deeper than ever, worming their way through blogs, social networking sites, photo sharing sites, and public records to gather as much information about you as possible. Some engines even allow editors to create pages for users they can't find. So if you thought your privacy was up for grabs before, check out the following five people search engines, ranked from most invasive to least (4 eyeballs being most, 1 the least), and discover how easily you can be found online.

 

 

This people search engine crawls deeper than most to include social networks, blogs, and publicly available info such as addresses, birthdays, SEC filings, court records, patents, and more.

 

PeekYou 
www.peekyou.com



PeekYou lets users search for people by first name, last name, user name, tags, or location. The aggregated profile pages contain bios and links to blogs and social networks. They also have modules for RSS feeds, so you can see what people are saying on their blogs and on Twitter. Anyone with an editor's account can edit profiles. Editors can also add pages for people they can't find.

 

Spock beta 
www.spock.com



Spock aggregates a person's profile by crawling blogs, photo sharing sites, and social-networking profiles. Users can vote on tags used to describe you.

 

Wink 
www.wink.com



Wink searches for people by name, location, school, work, and interests by crawling social networking sites. The site plans to also start crawling blogs, photos, and general Web pages. You can create and share your own Wink profile.


FindMeOn beta                              
www.findmeon.com



This profile-management service connects your online identities across social networks, blogs, and photo-sharing sites. Findmeon.com is a meta-social network that you can use to update all your sites simultaneously. You can hide select profiles from coworkers or family and use identity controls to share only the content you want.

 

ZoomInfo 
www.zoominfo.com



A business-focused people search service, ZoomInfo creates a profile based on information such as e-mail address, current and previous job titles, and positions on boards and in other organizations. For a fee, the service will let users see a person's contact info, or users can send an e-mail through the site, but they won't see the info unless the recipient responds.

 

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