As more and more people get connected to the Internet, the Web has become and valuable source of information for people looking for people. You can find biographies, home addresses, company phone numbers, email addresses and -- even -- someone's criminal record.
Let us say you were looking for a lost friend -- from college, maybe, or someone you met in Alaska in 1987. As more and more companies and organisations have their own Web sites with phone directories and presentations of their employees, chances are you might find him or her by doing a regular Web search. Who knows, this particular person may even have his or her own home page.
If you are searching for a celebrity you may use a search directory like Yahoo! or Pandia Plus. Some famous people may even merit their own category. Most of us, however, do not get our own personal listing in Yahoo!, so your best bet is using a normal search engine or a metasearch engine like Pandia Metasearch.
Put the the name of the person in quotes to delimit the name as a phrase. If you search for "William Joyce", you avoid getting pages listing other members of the Joyce family (or rather: families). If there are several variants of this person's name, you should list them all. If you are using Boolean search terms, you can write:
"William Joyce" OR "William R. Joyce" OR "Bill Joyce"
A similar query using search engine math would render:
"William Joyce" "William R. Joyce" "Bill Joyce"
Please note, there are no plus-signs in this query, as entering + before these variations would mean that all forms of the name must be present on all the pages listed by the search engine. That is not what you want.
(For more information on Boolean queries and search engine math, see the Goalgetter tutorial.)
Still, it is often better to use one of the specialised people finders on the Web. There are, for instance, several White Pages directories that list persons, phone numbers and addresses. Among our favourites are Switchboard and Infospace. Americans may find these very useful. They also list people from other parts of the world, but this coverage is far from perfect. However, Non-Americans who want to find people from their home country, may find the information they need at Phonenumbers.net or Populus. You will find all these sites listed on the Pandia People Search page.
E-mail search engines
There exists no global (or even national) email address directories. Most email directories are based on data given voluntarily by visitors to these sites. Hence, if you want people to find you, register! If you cannot find the address you are looking for using one engine, try another. Our favourite email address finders are Yahoo! People and Infospace E-mail.
When using search services like these, there are certain procedures that may improve your results. For instance:
- Enter as much information as possible, at least the family name and state (two-letter code) or country.
- If you know only a part of a name, enter that part and use a wildcard (normally an asterix) to fill in the blank. Is it William or Wilhelm? Write Wil*.
- In some countries married women are listed under the name of their husband (yes, we know, we are entering the 21st century, but this is how some people like to do it!)
- Some list their phone numbers without using their full first name. Try using an initial.
As there is not one perfect people finder, we often use a people metasearch engine to find persons on the Web. These search several of the best people finders in one go. We have included a search form for one of these on our new people search page. This page also includes links to all the services mentioned in this article, as well as a lot of other sites devoted to people searching: email address finders, white pages, yellow pages, public records, educational registers, genealogy sites, home pages, biography listings and more. If these cannot help you, you'd better hire a private detective!
0 comments:
Post a Comment