Guns, Gams, and Gumshoes

A couple of PIs who also happen to be writers

Finding Photos Through Deep Web People Search Sites

Posted by writingpis on November 21, 2009

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Finding Photos Through Deep Web People Search Sites

We were looking for a picture of someone this past week so we could serve him legal papers.   We’d gone our usual route of checking sources, including Google Images (a great search for pictures because of Google’s comprehensive search engine).  Nothing.  Started digging in other databases and resources for anything on the guy…nothing.

We were starting to wonder if his age (barely legal) was affecting our ability to get results.  After all, someone that young has few, if any, traces in public records.

Deep Web People Search Engine: Pipl

Then we decided to dig into a Deep Web search engine called pipl (pipl.com), which boasts its “query-engine helps you find deep web pages that cannot be found on regular search engines.”   They display an impressive list of categories in their results, including people’s personal profiles, web pages, documents, blog posts, publications, news archives, photos…

Ah, photos.

pipl posts photos on the right side of the results as well as in a Photo category farther down the page.  It was in this Photo category we found our guy—an inmate photo of him from a state prison.  Well, that answered a lot of our questions.

Other Deep Web People Search Engines

There are other Deep Web people search engines,  such as 123people (123people.com) and cvgadget (cvgadget.com).   123people is riddled with ads for online pay-for-use search engines (buyer beware–one never knows with these online search companies how current/correct the information is, and there’s no live person to help the buyer interpret results).  Saying that, 123people provides some good info (photos, references on the web, blog posts and references, etc.).  Cvgadget has a simple to use interface (just plug in the person’s name), and results are listed in expandable categories (from references in Google News, Blogs, Images, and other Google listings to references in different online communities). 

Deep Web people searches are a good way to find people, be it photos of a person, their posts on blogs, their social networking sites, their publications, and more.   Results can be comprehensive, and the ones listed in this post are still free.

One Response to “Finding Photos Through Deep Web People Search Sites”

  1. Gary Anderson said

    These are two sites I’ll be using next week. I have been searching for someone and thought I’d exhausted all search engines. Thanks!

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