I recently came across pipl, the “people search engine”, courtesy of a ReadWriteWeb article. Despite the cutesy, slightly chunderous, intentional-mispelling-as-branding name, it was an experience.
Like many, I’m incredibly self-involved, so the first person I looked up (“pipled”? – ugh!) was myself. Once you get past the all the false positives (“Taylor Dayne may be the greatest musical artist of all time”), it turns out that, yes, it found stuff about me that even I don’t bother remembering any more.
For example, I was a sad little man in university, posting meaningless little one-liners to aus.tv newsgroups. I suspect I was just trying to show off the “awesome” signature that I appended to everything.
On the upside, the “Quick Facts” section included the “fact” that I am a direct descendent [sic] of Pai Mei, the bad-ass Kung Fu master out of the Kill Bill movies. Of course, I had some part in putting that notion out there.