Information On Someone
How to Find Information on Someone Online: 7 Simple Steps
If you want to track a person down, the web is awash with potential resources. You can find anyone online with the help of search engines, social networks, and public records among other tools.
Whether it’s a lost friend, a rogue landlord, or an old teacher, you should be able to locate them with a bit of digging. Here are steps to finding information about someone online.
1. Check Google Search
Google should always be your first port of call. A simple search could reveal all sorts of information about a person, including their job, family, and the city they live in.
If the person in question has a common name, try using some of Google’s Boolean search operators to narrow your focus. It’s also worth checking out Google News. It will reveal any recent notable achievements or infamous scandals.
2. Set Up a Google Alert
If you can’t find any information using Google, try setting up some Google Alerts. If something about the person you are looking for appears on the web in the future, you’ll receive a notification in your email inbox.
To set up a Google Alert, head to and enter the person’s name in the search box. Click on Show Options to customize settings such as language, region, and notification frequency.
3. Check Other Search Engines
Google isn’t the only show in town. There are lots of search engines out there. They all have differing search algorithms, meaning you’ll be able to dig up alternative nuggets of information by using them.
4. Check Mainstream Social Networks
Estimates suggest that the number of social media users worldwide stands at around 4. 2 billion as of January 2021. As a result, there’s a strong chance that the person you want to track down is out there somewhere.
You should scan all the usual haunts such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. But make sure you don’t overlook LinkedIn. Some professionals may maintain their LinkedIn profile as their only social media presence.
5. Check Public Records
“Public records” is a broad term. Which records are available online is hit-and-miss. If you’re in luck, you might be able to find a person’s birth certificate, marriage license, divorce decree, and more.
You also be able to check documents such as land use certificates and company registers to see if the person has any entries connected to their name.
Sites to look at include:
Zabasearch
Zabasearch is a good starting point, but it will return a massive amount of information. It pulls information from openly available records like court records, voter registration information, and Yellow Pages etc. To manage the deluge of information, you can narrow it down to a state, for example.
Most of the information is available free of charge, and you should exhaust all your search options before taking the paid route.
VitalRec
VitalRec will help you find birth certificates, death records, marriage licenses, and divorce decrees for every state, county, and town records office in the United States.
The site also has some international records. Countries covered include Australia, Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, the U. K., Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, and Sweden.
The National Sex Offender Public Website
The National Sex Offender Public Website—or NSOPW for short—is the U. S. list of registered sex offenders.
It contains the databases for all 50 states as well as the District of Columbia, U. territories, and Indian Country.
Military Records
Veterans’ Service Records are available through the National Archives in the United States. It includes photos, documents, and searchable databases are available.
Note that the data is not exhaustive. The National Archive’s curators admit the majority of the information is not available online. That’s especially true for pre-World War I records.
Copyright Records
If the person you’re trying to find is a writer, musician, or otherwise involved in the creative arts, you might find a reference to them in the United States Copyright Office. The department’s records are all searchable online.
You can search for both personal names and corporate names. Other countries maintain their own equivalent searchable databases.
Patent Records
Similarly, if the person you want to track down is a scientist or inventor, you might find them in the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s public records.
You can search by name, design mark, keywords, and more. Again, other countries have comparable databases.
Federal Bureau of Prisons
There’s a chance that the person is incarcerated. After all, almost one in every 100 American adults is behind bars.
If they’re a convicted criminal, they might not show up on social media or in some of the other sites we’ve discussed. So, you can check the nationwide list of detainees on the official Federal Bureau of Prisons website.
6. Check Niche Search Engines
Still no luck? Don’t worry; you’re not out of options yet. Next up, check out some deep search engines. They specialize in specific industries, regions, and social networks.
Some niche search engines that will help you find someone online:
PeekYou
PeekYou scans people’s social media accounts along with references to a person’s username on other sites and blogs. You need a name and (optionally) a phone number to begin.
Pipl
Pipl is excellent at uncovering phone numbers, addresses, and links to public records. You can refine your search by city, state, and zip code to get a narrower selection of hits.
Find a Grave
If the person you’re looking for is deceased, you could head to the Find a Grave website. It is the world’s most extensive database of information about graves and tombstones. It is a collection of user-submitted photos and content.
At the time of writing, there are 170 million memorials you can search through. There is a mix of ordinary deceased people and departed famous people.
In the same vein, has millions of official cemetery records from thousands of cemeteries around the world.
Data is available for the United States, Belgium, Brazil, Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, and Poland.
Lastly, it’s worth poking around on a few niche social networks. You’d be surprised at the diversity in the number of smaller sites out there. There are networks specifically created for investors, beer lovers, neighborhood communities, and more.
It’s Easy to Find People Online
The diverse array of tools we have covered should help you get up and running in your bid to find information about someone online.
As long as you work through all the sources in a logical manner (and spread your net wide enough), you’re almost sure to be able to find the person you are looking for eventually.
13 Websites to Find People on the InternetLooking for lost friends? Today, it’s easier than ever before to find people on the internet with these people search engines.
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About The Author
Dan Price
(1613 Articles Published)
Dan joined MakeUseOf in 2014 and has been Partnerships Director since July 2020. Reach out to him for inquires about sponsored content, affiliate agreements, promotions, and any other forms of partnership. You can also find him roaming the show floor at CES in Las Vegas every year, say hi if you’re going. Prior to his writing career, he was a Financial Consultant.
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Find Anyone Online: 7 Free Web Resources – Lifewire
Reconnect with old friends and long-lost family
Updated on October 07, 2021
Want to reconnect with someone? Maybe you’re needing to track down a long-lost classmate, a friend you just lost contact with, or even look up your genealogy.
You can do all this and more with the resources below that help you find someone online.
How to Get the Most Out of This Guide
We suggest you do the following:
Have a word processor tool or note-taking program handy to keep track of what you find on the person. You’ll likely need multiple sources to gather enough valuable information on him or her, so keeping it all logged in one place is smart.
Use as much information on the person as you have available. Do you know their full name? What about their physical address or email address? A date of birth or death can be helpful, too. These tidbits of information, and more, will be helpful in your search.
Feel free to use as many sources as possible. It’s virtually impossible to find everything you’re looking for on the person from just one place.
Google: Track Someone Down All Across the Web
While a dedicated people finder tool like TruePeopleSearch is helpful, if the information on the person hasn’t been gathered by that site, you won’t find it. Fortunately, there are also several really great search engines you can use to broaden your search.
Google is a prime example of a handy resource for finding somebody for free because it scours a tremendous number of web pages and has all sorts of advanced commands you can use to narrow down your searches.
For example, while typing John Smith will give a general search for that name, putting the name in quotes and adding relevant information, like where he’s from or where he went to school, can help a lot.
“John Smith” Atlanta “Burgess-Peterson Academy”
How to Use Google to Find People Online
LinkedIn: Search for Someone Using Business Information
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 their current job, education history, professional affiliations, interests, and more.
If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to find lots of information here, and end your search. Or, you can use what you find to search for the person elsewhere online. Every little bit counts.
Visit LinkedIn
Zillow: Find a Person’s House Information
The best way to search for someone when all you have is an address would be a reverse address lookup tool. However, a real estate website like Zillow lets you find other details about the person’s home just by typing the address or zip code.
When you look for someone here, you won’t find a person by their name or dig up any history on them like you can with those other methods, but you will find a wealth of home-related details unmatched elsewhere.
Zillow digs up details like a value estimate, square footage, number of bedrooms/bathrooms, possibly pictures of the inside and the yard, the year it was built, various features of the house, and nearby schools they might have attended.
Visit Zillow
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5 tips for finding anything, about anyone, online – CNET
Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET
I think everyone should have decent online stalking skills. Not because I condone stalking, but because knowledge is power — if you don’t know how to find people online, how do you know what people can find about you online? Googling yourself is like checking your credit report for inaccuracies: it’s only effective as a preventative measure if you do it thoroughly and routinely. Whether you’re looking for yourself or a friend (no judgment), here are five tips for finding out anything, about anyone, online: Plug everything you know into doesn’t matter how little you know about the person you’re looking for, your search is going to start with Google. And it should, because Google is a powerful tool (especially when you know how to use it). But if you don’t know anything particularly identifying about the person you’re looking for (such as their email address), it’s better to skip the fancy search hacks and go straight to plugging in keywords. Open up Google and type in everything you know about the person in keyword format; for example, “sarah los angeles writer tech. ” Even if you only know their first name, keywords related to their job, marital status, location and school will likely bring up social networks or other identifiable Facebook’s People no social networks pop up in your initial Google search, you may need to go into the social networks themselves. Facebook is the most popular social network, and it has the most robust search engine, so you should probably start there. Facebook’s People Search lets you search for people by filling in one or more search boxes: Name, hometown, current city, high school, mutual friend, college or university, employer, and graduate school. If you know one or two of these things about your subject, you can narrow down your search and then browse through the photo your subject has no social media presence, try to find their friends and family members; it’s possible they’re hiding their account behind a fake name. If you have no idea who their friends and family members are, and you know their full name, use a free people search like Intelius to look up then hunt down those relatives. Make dividual data points don’t mean anything unless they can be connected to other data points to make up a person’s online presence. Once you have several facts about your subject, you’ll need to use your brain to make connections and fill in the blanks. For example, if you know your subject’s name, job title, and location, you can probably find their LinkedIn profile. On their LinkedIn profile, they’ve probably listed their undergraduate degree and when they graduated from college, which means you can work backward to figure out approximately how old they are. Remember people are not very you can find someone’s username, Twitter account, personal email address or YouTube profile, you may have hit gold. People, for the most part, aren’t very creative when it comes to mixing up usernames (or passwords), so they’ve likely recycled that username many times over. Start by plugging their username into Google, but also look through social networks, forums such as Reddit, and blogs for old comments or posts. A picture is worth a thousand recycle usernames, passwords, and social media profile pictures. Grab their profile pic from their Facebook or Twitter account and plug it into a reverse image lookup such as TinEye. TinEye will scan the image and then spit back all other instances of that image that it finds on the web — this is a great way to find now-defunct social media profiles, old LiveJournals, and online dating profiles. You can also use Google Images to do a reverse image search by going to Google Images, clicking the camera icon in the search box, and uploading the image you want to search.
