Online People Search

No, really. I am totally blown away by the amount of people-related information available online. There is even an increasing concern by various people over the amount of information about them found online. They know this trend is gonna be increasing in the near and distant future.

I encourage you as you discover some of the websites I share, to enter your name there and see what comes up! Many people are very (un)pleasantly surprised afterwards!

For example, take a look at the public records directories. Some of the best ones are:

- Whitepages
- Anywho
- Addresses
- Zabasearch

These websites index over 200 MILLION public records from US alone! 200 million people! Imagine that.

But there are also some disadvantages. Occasionally you'll find outdated addresses or phone numbers. Also some people even request removal from those databases for the fear of their safety.

However, there is another trend of searching people that's emerging and becoming even more powerful than public record search. That is...

800 million people. Millions of profiles. You've heard of them: Hi5, MySpace, Facebook and many other. Almost everyone have a social networking account these days. That makes it even easier for us to perform an online people search. Before starting, it is useful to know several details about the person you're looking for as:

- His nickname (if you know how does he represent on the internet). If his name is Michael and he lives in Florida then you might want to search for Mike...from Florida. If her name is Barbara you might want to search for Barb...or whatever...

There's a little problem here.

There are hundreds of social networking communities. It is time consuming to go and search through all of them separately.

That's why "all in one" people search services like Wink and Spock exist. You just enter the person's name or nickname and you get results from all the major social networking sites.

Some of the best people search services except Wink and Spock are:

- Pipl
- 123 People

There's one great website for finding people called Findermind.com on which you can find even more information on this area.

Want to know when the person's name is getting mentioned on the web? In real time? Or maybe daily...

Check out Google Alerts. It's a cool service from Google that gives you the latest news/blog posts/web items posted on the search term you've chosen.

How to use it:

The best way to use Google Alerts is:
Look right at Search terms. Enter the first and the last name of the person you're looking for in quotes. For example, if you're searching for James Doe, you'll need to enter "James Doe". Leave the "type" to comprehensive and "How often" to once a day. Then enter your email (it doesn't have to be Gmail account by the way!) and that's it.

An email confirmation will arrive to make sure you are the legal owner of that email address.

1. You can see who else is looking for that person.

There might be another people who are looking for the same person as you...who knows?

2. See what they do

Except their first and last name you might want to enter their 'nickname'. However, if they have a common nickname that won't help. If you're looking for Michael then simply entering "Mike" won't help because there are millions of people posting under the name of "Mike" on the web. The key here is to make your search queries as accurate as possible. Do this ONLY if the person you're looking for has some unique nickname that isn't found easily on the web.