Few weeks ago I was reading a blog post by Robert Scobble
Is the real-time web a threat to Google search?

He makes a valid point on google no longer being the comprehensive search engine.  I agree, when it comes to finding people. Recently,  Linkedin has been actively promoting profiles on google and that could change the game for google. I like piple.com better though.

How i found Roy:
It has been years (9 yrs)  and i have almost lost contact with most of my friends from my years in Bombay. Occasionally I would do a google search  to find my friends. And always i have been very unlucky.  Firstly because when you are finding a person, google still treats your search term as keyword and not a person. And secondly, most Indian names have 10,000 people (Well with population at approx. 1 billion + its easy to run out names).  I had almost given up.

And one day I stumbled upon pipl search at techcrunch. pipl.com is a vertical search engine focused on finding people.

When i typed in Roy varkey + his profession in pipl.com,  the site’s search result gave me more relevant results than google. pipl.com treats your serach term as a person as opposed to keyword and hence fetches more relevant results. Here is some extract from piple.com about their methodology for search.

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.

From the search result I was able to find all the Roys, i could narrow the results by profession and then skim through the results to where he lives and the company he works for. The comany’s website had their phone number and then the rest was easy.