Where do people search engines like Radaris, Intelius, and Pipl pull data from?

Full disclosure - I work for Pipl.  There are at least 3 different types of 'search engines': 1) Companies that aggregate and buy data for the purpose of selling services back to the consumer - Intelius, PeopleFinders, US Search, etc.. 2) Companies that crawl/aggregate data from either search engine indexes (like google, Bing, Yahoo, etc..) and from popular sources (facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc..). 3) Real search engines (like us) that look for every possible location online that has data on people (and there are thousands of locations) including but not limited to government agencies, county clerk records, search indexes, etc.. Hope this helps...

Hi, The best answer to this question comes from the Intelius FAQ section, which states: "all of the information contained in our databases is available from many other sources, such as the public records custodians and private data compilers. For example, home addresses are available from county land records, tax assessor files, and telephone directories. Additionally, many companies retrieve and publish public records, and many government agencies and private information vendors now make their records available electronically and over the Internet." The trouble for people seeking to remove their information from the Web is that, even if they can remove it from people search databases, it may crop back up again because it wasn't removed from the source. That's why we offer customers an ongoing privacy protection service that will alert you if you've reappeared in a people search database. Rob Frappier Community Manager ReputationDefender