Best People Search Engines to Find Your Old Friends
Finding someone you met somewhere can be hard when you didn’t exchange numbers or don’t remember their names. The best bet someone in such a situation can find is a library’s big fat edition of yellow pages. But given how everything is going online nowadays, it should make our work pretty easier to have a few good websites that can save us a trip to the library. Thankfully, there are quite a few such options available. I’m here to tell you all about it!
Some of these are pretty popular, like LinkedIn, while others may not have been so popular. I’d love to read which best People Search Engine you like or perhaps would like to suggest to be added to this list.
Let’s get to it.
New Entry – Kiwi Searches
New Find
Information.com
If you want to find out basically everything possible about someone when you only have minimal leads to go on, Information.com is the perfect tool for you. Their people lookup tool is incredibly powerful and sifts through all the available public records connected with a person. That means you’ll possibly see their current and past addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, criminal records, and marriage or divorce records. Plus, Information.com goes a step further and even pulls social media accounts and dating profiles – so you can get a full update on your old friend, plus know all the best ways to reconnect with them!
1. Facebook’s Graph Search
The truth is Facebook is among the most powerful people search engines available to everyone. Use Graph search and you will witness the true strength of this website. You can search for the person using their interests, where they went to school or a group they may be part of, and the results are usually accurate in the first five results itself. But it might not always be appropriate to send them a friend request right away. Like if you’d prefer to connect with them in a more professional way. There are more options you can use in that case. Like this next one.
2. Spokeo
Spokeo tracks the individual you’re searching for from white pages, social networking profiles and even public records. The website covers records from a whopping 55+ social networks that we’ve checked out, and the details it uncovers for you ranging from photos, email IDs, locations and even dating site profiles. It can help you find people by reverse searching with their phone numbers and letting it reveal what profiles and email IDs it is connected to. The down side? Spokeo is paid and charges about 5 bucks a month, which isn’t exactly nothing. There are free options available everywhere, so it also becomes a bit unnecessary to pay 5 whole bucks a month for a service you might use only a few times each year.
3. Zabasearch
If you’re looking for something more streamlined and approachable, you might find Zabasearch more to your liking. The sterile, white and grey website sure appears drab and with all the advertisements it has, you’d think it was a scam. But trust me, it’s pretty neat. The advanced search capabilities are the real attraction. The website allows you to search people like through a regular white-page website, but also has reverse phone look-up. An interesting tab is the “Top 25 Name Searches”, which brings you the most looked-up names, mostly all celebrities. The drawback is that it’s database is restricted to the US of A only.
4. Pipl
Pipl is touted to be the most popular People Search Engine, but there is no way we can verify that claim. It surely measures up better on its other claim of being comprehensive. Pipl is capable of bringing search results from all over the world, and things are fairly accurate. You get social media profiles, email addresses and people the person is associated with collected right where you need them to be. The sponsored posts (read advertisements) are a little intrusive though. The service is still more than decent.
5. Whitepages
I know people use Whitepages to find out who lived at their building or in the neighborhood, using their very accurate reverse address option. Other search options are just as good as well. The website lets you use public records too, apart from the usual name search and phone number searching. The white background looks a little sanitised, but I think it adds to the surgical touch. It’s great to use on oneself and find out what one’s records thus far have been. It also brings information around family and friends as well as professional contacts, and might even help you fetch peoples’ contact details. The disadvantage once again is the steep price, and it is steeper than Spokeo, at 20 bucks a month. It is still a good option to use for the free features though.
6. BeenVerified
Meet someone on a dating site? Thinking of hiring someone based on their interview? You might find a service like BeenVerified of much use. The website allows you to search for people and get their basic details for free. But You can fetch a full report of the person from the site to make sure they are reliable and worthy of joining your organisation or taking home to your parents. The service is limited to the US, unfortunately, but only in terms of some advanced features. Otherwise, the website brings you results from around the world. It makes up for its shortcomings by being available as an app on both iOS and Android. Not a bad bet at all, eh?
7. Wink
If you’ve used iTools before, you know how great their online tools can be. I love playing their Word Games and discovering specialised words on their website. Wink is another powerful tool they carry that lets you find people easily. The interface is pretty straightforward; you punch in the name and any information you may have about the person and you get accurate results displayed on your second in the next second. The website is a little shoddy by contemporary standards, and I blame it largely on them not having updated to a better interface in quite some time. But for a free tool, it is pretty decent.
8. Intelius
Intelius is advertised on most other people searching platforms, so I was curious to see if it lived up to the hype. It did. The website is the smattering of color that this list needed, with the green tabs and the orange buttons and the welcome blue hyperlinks. But Intelius is more than just a pretty website. They can fetch you records from some pretty neat places, such as crime records, property records and more such places which might be useful when you’re trying to get a background check for someone you met for a job or other such professional connection. The usual services like email-ID searching and social media connections are available as well. The same restrictions bind this website up as well. A 24-hour full access pass costs a whopping 20 big bucks. The monthly pass is costlier still. The search capability too is restricted to the USA alone, which is pretty unimpressive for a service this costly. The service does try to make up by offering apps for Android and iOS, but I’ll leave it to you to decide if that is enough to justify the price.
9. YourFamily.com
Fetching ancestry records can be tough. Your Family makes quick work of the task though. Among options, you have the ability to discover family members you’ve never known about, requesting the community to help you locate a branch of the family tree, as well as helping others discover their families. It fares better than people search websites, in fact. The website also allows you to develop a family homepage that lets people with similar ancestry find you a lot easier. You can also learn how to chronicle your family’s history by locating sites they lived in, provide photos and videos about the family, sharing family history books and even finding and sharing your coat of arms with people (or maybe rediscovering it for yourself). The website is free to use too, and I daresay a whole other level of useful.
10. LinkedIn
The benefit with LinkedIn is that people control their own profiles, and so you are likely to find their achievements diligently updated. But it’s not a platform to boast alone. People’s prior companies are usually on the service too, and most of them are active to respond to queries confirming or denying positions quoted by people in their profiles. LinkedIn is also free, and very professionally suited. It is a great tool to connect with people on a no-frills, professional looking interface that operates just like a social networking site.
11. Instant Checkmate
It seems asking 20 dollars is a standard practice for people search sites, because this one has the same price. It is not particularly exhaustive in my honest opinion, but it is certainly useful to fetch criminal records and other prior records that might be of interest to you. The website even fetches you court documents pertaining to their criminal history if they have any. It can be useful to check someone’s real age, their address(es) and verify their phone numbers. Once again, however, Instant Checkmate only fetches results from USA.
12. AnyWho.com
AnyWho caters information from public records and from Intelius. You might find it a neat alternative to the site if you want something simple; something even your grandmother can use. You can look up people through the yellow pages and reverse phone number searching, as well as their addresses. It is free, thankfully. The results tend to be inconsistent in terms of accuracy, but only compared to what websites like Pipl and BeenVerified offer. Not a bad option for someone looking to avoid spending 20 dollars, I say.
13. Census Finder
Who is to say one should only find someone through their social media profiles and contemporary criminal records? The census data is another amazing place to find more about people, especially when you want to look for information about genealogies or living circumstances. That said, paging through a compilation on information as big as a country or even a region’s census can be tedious. Thanks to Census Finder, information from census records is a minute away. The website is a bit crowded with ads and the links and text are kind of small, but it makes sense; it takes money to keep a website online, plus listing all those links in big text would make the website run for a mile. Your mouse scroller would give way! The information on the website is restricted to the USA, the UK and Canada and Native Americans. Hard luck if you want to find someone from some other place. But if you try browsing the site, you might find their partner sites pretty interesting, such as Ancestor Hunt’s listing of Family Coat on Arms.
14. PeekYou
Perhaps one of the best free People Search Engines is PeekYou. The website fetches social media accounts, email IDs, public records and more, even going to fetch blogs and references to the news one may have figured in. One useful way to use the service is to dial back peoples’ usernames. It might just help you locate your troll or an internet bully and report them if they are being extra disgusting. Though it is capable of searching for information globally, it only works well with USA based searches. I guess that’s the price you pay instead of actual money. It should work pretty well for people only looking for information on USA residents though.
15. MyLife
If you’re wondering with all these records up for scrutiny that summarise your entire life into a page of data, what can you do to make sure searchers have a good impression of you? MyLife is an online tool that allows you to alter the results that show up online. It doesn’t remove them, however, but it can still be useful to enhance the good parts and make the bad bits not impact the searching person that much. The website requires you to sign up to change that information, however. If you’re an average joe, however, you need not worry about needing to correct anything on it.
Quite a lot of tools to use, eh? Which one do you think is the best one among these? Let me know in the comments below.
