How to Find Someone
Maybe you're looking to find a long-lost friend, a high-school sweetheart, or even a family member with whom you have lost touch with. Whatever the case may be, you want to know how to find someone, even though you likely do not know much, if anything, about where this person might be. Our simple step-by-step guide will show you a variety of methods that you can use to find somebody using the internet.
Step 1: Get your facts straight
Take out a pen and a piece of paper, or open up a text editor and list everything you know about this person. Helpful information can include: their full name, states and cities that they've lived in, schools that they've attended, usernames or 'handles' that they used online, phone numbers, email addresses, their age or estimated birth year, and the names of any relatives or close friends that they once had. You can potentially use all of this information to find your 'missing person', so it's important to keep what you know in front of you as you move forward.Step 2: Start by 'Googling' some names
Google is arguably one of the most relevant search engines available today, and while it isn't really a people search engine, it is a great place to start when you're trying to figure out how to find someone.
Initially, you should probably stick with searching for the person you are looking for, only. If you manage to go through this list and do not come up with the results you are looking for, you can start here, at step 2, and start looking for friends' names, associations, and relatives using the following steps.
When you are trying to find someone using a search engine, there are a couple of ways you can do it. For instance, if you are looking for Fred Smith, you can search for Fred Smith or Smith, Fred -- or, to narrow your results down more -- you can put quotes around the name to get more targeted results. For example, "Fred Smith", "Smith, F.", and so forth. If you happen to know a state or city where this person lived, you might try adding the city or state name to your search: "Fred Smith" Anaheim California, "F. Smith" New Jersey, and so on.
Step 3: Head over to 'people search' engines.
While there are thousands of people search services online, very few actually give you usable results without having to pay a membership fee. However, four services in particular:
provide a treasure-trove of information when you're looking to find people online free and easily. Wink and Pipl are especially useful as they list known online associations such as social networking profiles and websites that the person may use or operate. Pipl also allows you to search for people by their name, email address, username, or phone number -- very helpful if you only have limited information about who you are looking for.Step 4: Search Classmates.com
Classmates.com is the largest school-related social networking site around, and it has a huge database of classmates from all over the country going back dozens of years. If you know where the person whom your looking for went to school, it's worth a trip to classmates.com to see if you can connect with them there.
You can also use Classmates.com to try and find your friend or loved one through their kids who might be listed in Classmates.com -- even knowing a last name and a city could go a long way in helping you to find who you're looking for.
Step 5: Start looking for friends and known family members
If you've come this far with no results, you should start looking for known friends, family members, or classmates, so long as you know some of their names and general locations. While you could start with a Google search, back at step 2, it might be advantageous to jump right into using one of the free people search resources we listed in step 3.
By now, you should have a solid grasp on how to find someone online. The best way is to start out with the name of the person you are looking for, and then if you can't find them using the listed methods, to branch out using names of friends and family members until you can connect with somebody who knows your friend or relative.
While trying to find somebody online is like trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack, by using the steps outlined above, you just might discover that finding people online isn't quite as daunting as it seems to be at first.
