People Search

Finding People Online

Are you searching for an old friend? Trying to find someone's street address or phone number? Maybe you're looking for information on a potential employee, or checking out tonight's hot date. There are plenty of resources on the web to help you find people, and information about them. Some are free, but generally those can only dig up publicly available information. If you need to dig further, there are some fee-based online sleuthing tools that can help.

Let's start simple... have you ever Googled yourself? You might be surprised to see what others can learn about you with just a few clicks. Enter the name of someone you're looking for at your favorite search engine and you're likely to find links to local newspaper articles, clubs, and professional associations that mention him or her. If that person is active in online forums or blogs, you might learn a lot by seeing what they've written. If the person has a common first or last name, it might help if you can add a few keywords about the person's location or profession to narrow it down.

Yahoo's People Search is another powerful tool you can use. Type in your own name and address, and their mapping system will pinpoint your house. Scary? Maybe, but keep in mind the Internet hasn't made any "private" information available. Even 20 years ago, anyone with a phone book and a map could do the same thing, albeit a bit slower.

Other online white pages such as InfoSpace, Switchboard or The Ultimate White Pages can help if you have some idea of where the person is located. The latter is interesting because it will search several sources from one screen. Oh, and if you've got a phone number but you don't know who it belongs to, try a reverse lookup at one of these sites.

Searching for friends online is so popular now that it was part of the reason behind the origin of Facebook. Although it originally was designed to help students find other people on their campus, it has grown into a tool that will help you connect with old friends from high school, college, a workplace, or geographic region. their database of over 50 million, this is an excellent place to start. Try a search on Facebook or Myspace to see if the person you're looking for has a profile there.

Sites such as PeekYou and Wink take the social network approach one step further. These services aggregate information from over 200 million members of social networks to find your friend. It will check such sites as MySpace, Facebook, and others.

ClassMates and Reunion are designed to help you locate long lost acquaintances from high school or college. Classmates alone has more than 50 million members, so it's a good place to start when you're searching for an old school chum.

If you're searching outside the USA and Canada, try the InfoSpace World Directories or the AnyWho International page. If you want to search for someone in a particular country, Search Engine Colossus can help you find search engines local to a specific country.

Another widely used paid search is Intelius. This service not only offers names and address, but has recently added phone tracing. This includes address, phone number, and carrier for cell phones, VOIP, unlisted and unpublished numbers. A report with number will set you back $14.95. Other services include background checks, and home ownership info.

Finally, let’s go to the extreme. Gene Tree and Ancestry will help you trace your family roots. GeneTree can access over 100,000 samples in a data base of 6 million. You can order a test kit from the company for $99.99. Ancestry also allows you to check for relatives and is building its own database from scratch. With a base profile of about 50,000, you can receive a cheek swab from the company for $149.99.

These are just a few of the many search options that are open to you in your quest for you former friends, relatives, or those you are merely curious about. Do you have a great people search tool? Post a comment below...