Pipl is a search engine for people. You can type anyone's name and location and potentially bring up their online profile, blogs and even their electoral roll details. Pipl claims that the ‘deep web’ that they search has up to 500 times more content that the usual surface web, but this has (until now) remained largely untapped.

This Guardian article might shine some light on the deep web if you're interested - it definitely is interesting stuff

Claire, our lovely operations director, has already managed to track down Cheryl Cole:

As she quite rightly pointed out, this really does take stalking to a whole new level. Search tools like Pipl will inevitable raise questions about privacy, but I thought I’d test out its invitation to ‘try searching for people and see the difference’. So, I typed my name in to see what it could tell me about myself...(and more importantly, what it could tell other people).

Interestingly, Pipl didn’t bring up any Facebook profiles, just what I assume to be lots of outdated Tagged and MySpace profiles of other people lucky enough to share my name. It didn’t even manage to find my LinkedIn profile. Maybe we could attribute this to the fact that I have an unusually common name, which in this case has worked to my advantage as it seems to make me unfindable, a needle among a pile of lots of identically named stalks of hay perhaps. Try searching for yourself, and see what Pipl can dig up about you...