Blog: Pete Loshin: Time Magazine sez "Online Snooping Gets Creepy"

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Time Magazine sez "Online Snooping Gets Creepy"

According to Time Magazine, Online Snooping Gets Creepy. I'm not so sure about that. Web "snooping" has always been more or less creepy in some ways, and more or less useful in others.

Time points to a new wave of search engines that supposedly go beyond and behind the web content that Google indexes to give an uncannily complete profile of whoever you want to "investigate". These include ZoomInfo, PeekYou, Pipl, Wink/, and Spock/.

I tried them out, using my own name since I can best judge the results (except for Spock, which was down for maintenance) and here are the results:

As far as PeekYou is concerned, I don't exist. Boo.
ZoomInfo came up with references to a lot of work I've done over the years that I sort of forgot about--as well as some "positions" with companies I'd never heard of. I even signed up for full (free) privileges, which wasn't too intrusive and gave me access to all the sources they cite. So, it's actually pretty useful, for me.
Pipl gave me a lot of information, including links to places where my publications have been cited, as well as contact information. Pretty good, but it looks like a front-end to existing engines, including Google. OK.
Wink found some stuff about me (including this blog), but seemed to miss a lot more. It does point to my LinkedIn profile, but otherwise it doesn't really find much else of interest.

How do they stack up to Google? Well, Google is still a more comprehensive search engine, pointing to a more complete set of my publications (books as well as articles published online), including lots of pointers to websites and blogs that seem to have "borrowed" my articles for their own use. Oh well.

If you're looking for someone's address, phone number or birthday, try Pipl; if you're looking for a terse and easy to understand (but possibly inaccurate) precis, try Wink. Otherwise, you might as well stick with Google, at least to start with.

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