People Searches?

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I've been seeing a lot of ads for creating people searches but I don't understand how you make money from those. Can anyone explain? From what little I've seen, we have to create our own automated people search engine but how can a search engine be automated? Or maybe I'm thinking of a different kind of search engine (since at the term, I immediately think google, yahoo, etc). But once you create a search engine, how can others use such an unknown search engine instead of the popular ones? The entire thing just boggles me. Have any of you tried it? Do you understand how it works?