People Finding

Below are notes taken from a presentation by Dan Giancaterino 9/15/2009.

Some of the basic staples for finding people are:

• White pages
• Search engines
• Maps
• State databases (such as unclaimed property, licenses, UCC, etc)
• Social Security Death Index

Professionals may use fee-based services, such as LexisNexis Choicepoint.  Choicepoint is used to do background checks, amongst other things.

No services are infallible, so its often wise to use more than one source to verify.

Intelius
A fee-based search engine that provides people search, background reports, Property reports, Criminal reports, Marriage/Divorce reports and Death reports.  Here are some SAMPLE REPORTS.may be viewed on their FAQ page.

Reference USA (also fee-base, but we provide this at the library)
Has information on virtually every U.S. and Canadian business or resident!


Newsbank
"NewsBank’s comprehensive, Web-based research products satisfy the diverse needs of publishers, public libraries, colleges and universities, schools, government and military libraries, genealogists, professionals and researchers."

Freecourtdockets.com
Free access to over 33 million court dockets, such as Civil, Criminal and Bankruptcy court dockets, the Supreme Court, the US Court of Claims, and Appeals Court is coming soon.

Phone records are becoming more difficult to obtain as more people switch to cell-phones.  For most people under age 30, you may need to resort to "social search" methods.

Social Search


123people.com
"a real time people search tool that looks into nearly every corner of the web. Using our proprietary search algorithm, you can find comprehensive and centralized people related information consisting of images, videos, phone numbers, email addresses, social networking and Wikipedia profiles and much more."

Pipl
"Unlike a typical search-engine, Pipl is designed to retrieve information from the deep web, our robots are set to interact with searchable databases and extract facts, contact details and other relevant information from personal profiles, member directories, scientific publications, court records and numerous other deep-web sources."  Pulls up sort of a dossier of stuff on the person.  But it's not perfect.  For example, using the first name of Dan vs Daniel will pull different data.

Zoominfo
"With in-depth profiles on over 45M business people and 5M companies, you can find people you know and those you need to know with our solutions."  Zoominfo assembles a dossier for you.


Spock

"uses a combination of search engine technologies and user edits to aggregate the world's people information and make it searchable. Spock finds all kinds of information like websites, photos, videos, and blogs about people."

Wink
"Wink is a people search engine that makes it easy to find and connect with people online. Wink.com is the largest online people search with more than 200 million people profiles from across the Web, including social networks and other online communities"  Helps you to find someone's social network.

Twitter Search
"There is an undeniable need to search, filter, and otherwise interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to Twitter every second. Twitter Search helps you filter all the real-time information coursing through our service."


And don't forget Facebook and MySpace as potential places to search for someone.