How to find people - The top ten ways to find someone online
Whats really good with my investor savvy member community and stray visitors? I have another basic but definitely important article for you to check out. I hope you been keepin up with me. I been on the move but thats what you have to do if you really wanna make it happen. You either Networkin or Notworkin. Which one are you? ...Enough Said....
I posted this because when I find a vacant house I need to find that owner ASAP!! So here is a few tips. May not be the best but hey, it will get you started, you just mix and match and do what you do...Just never quit until you hit paydirt. Hope you Enjoy!
1.Google
By far the best way people finder on the internet, it's been around so long, it contains so much – how can it not be the very best people resource tool out there? Look at the facts, if you've had anything written about you online Google knows about it. The secret to finding people on Google is to use the quotation marks around the name of the person and then round the location i.e. "John Stevens" "London" by doing this you are greatly improving your chances of finding the person, remember to press the Cached button to get to the section of the webpage that is most relevant to your search. You can also search by their hobby i.e. "John Stevens" "Model Railways" this can get you to the correct person just as easily as their location. Finally remember the more popular the name the smaller the location area will have to be.
2.Facebook
It used to be Bebo and MySpace but those places must be like graveyards compared to what they used to be like, everyone is on Facebook now and it looks like it's here to stay. Finding people on Facebook is easy, you can try and search directly for them and if that doesn't work you can search for their friends to get to them, best of all its free to register and to contact people, an easy and fun way to find your old friends and see what they are doing now. People also upload their photos and usually where they work and who their other friends are so you can find out a lot of information regarding people from their Facebook accounts.
3. Friends Reunited
Not as popular as it used to be (see above) but still a fantastic way to find people and even better it is now free to do so, they will never capture the spirit of 10 years ago when it was one of the biggest websites in the world but still, you should be able to find your old school chums on Friends reunited and not only that you should be able to email them. Even if they don't check the site very often (many people don't) they should receive an email to say someone has tried to contact them so it is still in the top three people finders according to findermonkey.co.uk staff.
4. Twitter
Twitter is good for finding people and every so often they tell you a bit about what they are doing and similar to Facebook a lot of people have a photo of themselves on there. How long till Twitter is no.1 on this list is anyone's guess but had anyone even heard of this micro blogging site three years ago? This is still an excellent source for finding people for free.
5. 123People
We're slipping down the list a bit here as this is a good way to find people online but it does have some drawbacks, the primary one is although it has a US and UK option it does seem to merge the two together so you do get a lot of results that are not relevant. It does have some email addresses though so it is certainly worth using, you may just get lucky and that is a big part of finding people online.
6. The Electoral Roll
An electoral roll search is still a great way to find people but it's just not as good as it once was. Back in 2003 the electoral roll was unedited, now it has an opt out option and people are doing so in their millions. In 2003 there were 44 million records on the Electoral Roll in 2010 this had dropped to 14 million. Along with the above options it is still a great way to locate someone and if you use the correct company you can find one that not only searches the current electoral roll but also the last available unedited version too as well as the ones in between.
7. Ancestry.co.uk
Ok so generally this is used to work on the family tree stuff but you can access birth and marriage certificates through this site so if you are going down the Sherlock Holmes route of people finding and doing some serious digging then this might just be the site for you. It is rather expensive but they do have a large achieve of information and some of it could be what you need to break through your people finder case. A bit specialist? Maybe but a great people resource anyway.
8. The National Archives
Again this is a specialist tool but one that we use very often, it is easy to use and can bring up some really interesting stuff, this is more suited to finding out information relating to land and people rather than old friends and school chums but we thought we would add some more specialist people finder tools rather than the usual ones. This site is used on a regular basis by all findermonkey.co.uk staff.
9. BT Phone book
The old ones are the best ones! And this is no different, now available on-line for free. You can search through people's names and their location to see if it brings up their telephone number. If you are ringing round to see if one of the matches is your old friend, just make sure you use some common courtesy when doing so, it sounds obvious but some people will be rude to you, it's not worth getting involved with them. Just thank them for their time and move on, the next person you ring might be your long lost friend.
10. Other resources
There are plenty of resources available to help you locate people such as our people search blog findermonkey.co.uk/blog/ or people search-uk. Just keep your eyes peeled for the best ones and if you want to add to this list feel free to do so.
Good luck with your people finding.
Peace!!
