How to Use the Invisible Web to Find People

Wayback Machine

If the person you're looking for has ever created a website or has information you know was on the web, but the content has been since deleted, you can look up that website via Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. It's a database of hundreds of billions of pages archived from 1996 to the present.

This is a good way to view hard-to-find information because snapshots of websites — including many that are no longer live on the internet — have been archived here.  I've successfully used Wayback Machine to dig up old blog pages that I can't find anywhere else.

FamilySearch

FamilySearch, one of the largest collection of genealogical and historical records in the world, is primarily a genealogy tracker, which makes it an invaluable deep web people search tool as well.

Type in as much information as you know, and this site will return birth and death records, parental information, siblings, and more, complete with sources. Digital preservation, digital conversion, general preservation of records, and online indexing is available here as well, all at no charge 

Zabasearch

Zabasearch is an extraordinarily effective invisible web people search engine. It pulls details from public records that include court records, country and state records, phone number listings, public transactions, voter registration records, and information that the individuals themselves put online.

Each time I've used this website, it shows me the person's middle name or middle initial, and their full address. If you want, you can click through to another website, Intelius, where you can pay for a lot more information.

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

If the person you're looking for has ever filed for a patent in the United States, you'll find it at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. For patents filed from 1976 and beyond, you can see the inventor's name and the patent's title, as well as other pertinent information.

Melissa Lookups

Melissa Lookups offers a wide range of free tools you can use to plumb the deep web for people information. This site searches U.S. addresses, house numbers by ZIP code, IP location, names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, and death information.

One of my favorite tools here is Personator. It verifies if someone's information is correct. I just have to put in the details I know, like a name, phone number, email, address, etc. In just a few seconds, it reports back to say if all of it matches an identity.

This site includes information for people in the US, Canada, Italy, India, Mexico, Singapore, Philippines, Australia, Germany, the UK, and some other locations.

192.com

192.com contains data on people, businesses and places in the U.K. You can find full names, addresses, age guides, property prices, aerial photos, company and director reports, family records, and corporate information here, all pulled from a number of sources on both the general and invisible web.