Whether you’re searching about a new potential employee, business partner, life partner or just plain curious… It’s important to know how to find out more info about people online.
I’ve been getting a bunch of people asking me about search engines specifically related to finding out more about people recently, so here is a brief summary.
I always suggest starting with a generic search engine like www.google.com – it pretty much indexes all the major sources online, and works pretty well most of the time. Where you start getting in to trouble, is if you are looking for a generic name, and there are 10 000 people all with the same name!
Also useful to try out Google’s Image Search to find people with common names, and also very useful if you have a generic name or a name where you can’t tell the gender to see the kind of results you get.
Don’t forget the basics with sites like www.whitepages.com or (in Australia) www.whitepages.com.au (the online version of the old fashioned telephone book)
Once you’ve done that, you can try out some people specific search engines like:
- Some people specific search engines, using multiple sources (eg web, social sites, images, news etc)
- http://www.peekyou.com
- http://www.yasni.com
- http://www.123people.com/
- http://www.pipl.com
- http://wink.com
- http://www.yoname.com – searches multiple social sites (like 43Things BlackPlanet Blogger Buzznet DailyMotion Deviantart Digg FaceBook Flickr Fotolog Friendster GrazeIt IRC-Galleria Last.fm LinkedIn MySpace Netlog Rediff skyrock SmugMug Twitter Vox Webshots Yelp YoName YouTube etc)
- http://klout.com/ – twitter search to see how much influence someone has (only has registered users and top people registered)
And a couple of USA only sites:
- http://www.zabasearch.com – USA search of public records for people
- http://criminalsearches.com – as the name suggests, find out if someone has a criminal record (for detailed info, you need to pay)
Good luck, happy searching!