Top 4 People Search Engines

Personal information is available at everyone’s fingertips at an increasing rate everyday. Privacy advocates are alarmed by this but law enforcement are using this to great benefit. This article explores the top 4 people search engines that anyone can use to track down old contacts or look up the identities of friend and foe.

1. Pipl

Pipl (pronounced “people”) is a simple to use people-search engine with an easy to use navigation. By default you can search for anyone using their first and last names along with a city and state. One click away you have the option to search by an email address or an online user profile name or even by phone numbers. Before you start plugging in all your contacts phone numbers in the search field, keep in mind, most cell phone number listings return results from NumberInvestigator.com, ReversePhoneDetective.com and USSearch.com which you need to pay to access. However Pipl does a good job of locating the company which owns the phone numbers. So what makes Pipl unique – according to them “Pipl’s query-engine helps you find deep web pages that cannot be found on regular search engines.” In all the searches I conducted with Pipl the results were accurate and very close to the real identities.

2. Spock

Spock is another people search engine with amazing results that will definitely surprise you. Unlike Pipl though, Spock is not free. You only get a tease of the results that await you if you fork over the $19.95 a month or $5 for a day trial. Spock seems to be a more exhaustive database which also includes school records which almost gives it another dimension. Spock has the ability to restrict results to certain predefined sources which include – Friendster, Hi5, Live Spaces, MySpace and Wikipedia. It also has some built-in filtering options such as results within a certain age group and returning results with pictures only. But the cost factor behind Spock might limit its growth since most users would simply opt for a free alternative when they wish to look up some old forgotten friend.

3. Wink

Wink is another people search engine which you need to pay for to access detailed results similar to Spock. The homepage of Wink proudly displays that it is the “world’s largest people search engine.” However in my testing I have found it to be anything but. Powered by PeopleFinders.com, Wink does return a lot more results that either Pipl or Spock. But the results are not correlated by person’s name or some other characteristic. For example in my testing I looked up a person who I know has moved from one state to another and Wink found 2 different people with the same name listed under each address but with vastly different ages. Age should have been between 20-30 and it was reported as 51. Wink does offer the ability to search by name, location, school, interest, career, groups and distance. But before I pay to see the results that Wink offers I would test the same queries on the free search engines such as Pipl before forking over $1.95 for each report or $19.95 for a monthly subscription.

4. ZabaSearch

ZabaSearch is powered by Intelius and is surprisingly accurate to name and phone number lookup, including cell phone records (creepy). It successfully correlates results even when someone has multiple addresses or names listed in separate states. But the drawback to ZabaSearch is paid results. It costs between $0.99 to $4.99 for single results and about $39.99 for 10 reports together. Similar to Pipl and Spock, Zabasearch is able to successfully search by names across all the states. However a unique feature to ZabaSearch is the listing of relatives or the name you are looking for. Including family in results is debatable – it might be an invasion of privacy and unethical. However listing related family members in the free results helps you accurately identify and possibly contact the person who you are looking for.