How can I find it?

Today's class was all about how to find people on the web.

There are many different types of people search tools out there, making it easier to find:

• White Pages Information
• Criminal Information
• Professional Information
• Social Information (Facebook, MySpace, etc.)

Announcements

• Happy Thanksgiving, eat lots of turkey.
• Search analysis assignment is due today – make sure your link are correct on the sign-up page
  • You do not need to add anything to the site-maker page for this assignment
• Exam is on December 2nd. Check out the Test page to find out information about it.
• This Saturday at midnight (November 28th) is the last day to make modifications (change questions, notes, etc.)

Beginning of Class

• Discuss the metasearch results from two classes ago.
  • Results were similar to last year
  • info.com was the only site to beat Google (two years in a row)
  • Clusty is crap
  • search.IO and Kosmix were the two favorites

People Search

1. This problem has applicability to many areas
   • Just trying to find a person's address or phone number
   • Background checks (including criminal checks)
   • Finding missing persons
   • Ancestry (including obituary searches)
2. A very frustrating, confusing topic
3. Monetary interests have really infiltrated this set of tools
   • Lots of Web site purchases (industry consolidation)
   • Lots of pay-for-results

Tip: Some search engines get confused with middle initials

Exercises

• Explore the 3 groups of people search sites
  • General people searches
  • White Page Directories
  • Social searches

• Send 6 Tweets! Include your favorite and least favorite in each category.

General people search

1. WhoZat (review)
2. Pipl (about) — can search by name, email, username (screenname), and phone; emphasizes that it searches the Deep Web.
3. ZoomInfo (advanced search, help) — find people or companies
4. Spock (people search on the web, blogs, social networks)
5. iSearch (review) — can search by name, phone, email, and username (screenname)
6. Whoozy (review) —- searches the Web and social networks

White page directories

1. 411 Locate — many different search tools:
   • search by name for person or business
   • reverse phone for person or business
   • reverse business address
2. WhitePages — lots of different search tools:
   • people & business search
   • reverse phone & address
   • find area codes, zip codes
   • neighborhood search (find the names of people who live near an address)
   • search for an email address
3. AnyWho — people search, reverse phone
4. ZabaSearch (advanced search, review) — search by name or by phone number.

Social site search

1. Wink — people search, phone number; will not only look for the specified name but similar names (i.e. Ted Kennedy, Theodore Kennedy…)
2. 123people — people search (review, review)
3. PeekYou — people search, username search
4. The Internet Address Book — "Find, manage and discover internet addresses worldwide"
5. Spokeo — good for searching social networking sites; most of the results require that you pay a fee.