Find Someone

A Step by Step Guide to Finding Someone on the Web

If you know your person's email address, username at various forums, message boards, social communities, etc., first and last name or phone number, type this information into YoName's search box and see what comes up.

YoName will search across six different social communities (LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Yahoo 360, and Friendster) to find what you're looking for.

If you know the person's name that you're looking for, type it into the LinkedIn search box and you'll get information such as current job, professional affiliations, and more.

If you're lucky, you'll be able to find a LOT of information on LinkedIn, and you'll be able to use that information in turn to keep going in your people search. Every little bit counts, so add it to your research file and keep going.

If you have an email address, a person's name, or a username, you are sure to hit some major paydirt with Spokeo, a people search engine that searches across forty different social networks.

Once you have found someone, you can keep track of what they're doing on these different social networks with Spokeo as well - which should save you some serious time.

123People is a people search engine that gives you a smorgasbord of information from all over the Web: links, documents, videos, email addresses, phone numbers, social networks, and a lot more.

Simply type your person's name into the 123People's search box and see what you can come up with; again, like I've mentioned before, if the person you're looking for is not active on the Web, you won't be able to find much information here. Then again, if they have ANY sort of activity online, you should be able to find it with 123People or any of the other search tools mentioned in this article.

If you have an address, you can find out a lot about your person's home at Zillow. Just type in an address, a general area, or a zip code, and Zillow will return a whole plethora of real estate information about your query.

In addition, you'll also be able to see how much that person's house has been valued at, houses in the surrounding areas, local resources, and more.

Flickr, a digital photo sharing site, is a great place to find someone because of two things: you can search for your person by their name or their username (if you know it), and you can search for your person via tags, since Flickr is largely organized by tags (content labels).

Try a quick search in Flickr and see what you come up with; it's not the best tool on this list but it certainly is worth a quick search when you're trying to find someone.

You can use Google Blog Search to find mentions of the person you're looking for in blogs all over the Web. Simply type in your person's name for a quick search. You can expand your search by checking out the Advanced Search page.

iSearch is a people search engine that you can use to find someone by name, by screen name, by phone, by company, or by school.

Type in the name of the person you're looking for, preferably with their location, and you'll get professional information, public records, social network results, White Pages, email, news, and blogs. In other words, potentially a lot of very useful information.

CVGadget returns results on the person you're looking for from about a dozen different places on the Web; you can expand and collapse these results to see your information.

Finding former military personnel can be tricky. You can use this resource from the London US Embassy as well to find who you're looking for; information is available for both active and former military personnel.